Beautiful Collision
by Dame Hetchel
Summary: Chapter 6. "Will," he said to the girl who wasn't there. "You have no idea how much I need you right now." Future/alt cartoonverse, CalebxWill.
1. You're Sixteen

A/N: Future cartoonverse, multi-parter, eventual CalebxWill. If the writers didn't want me to ship them, then they shouldn't have started setting the stage for it in the second episode with all that bantering/separated-from-the-group/Will-climbing-Caleb-like-a-tree business. It just feeds the plot bunnies, and _I _obey those little bastards, not the other way around.

The title is taken from a truly excellent album (and song) by Bic Runga.

Disclaimer: I don't own W.I.T.C.H.

* * *

**Beautiful Collision**

Prologue

* * *

Sweet sixteen. The irony wasn't lost on Will Vandom as she watched the numerals on her digital watch shift to 4:36 PM—the exact hour and minute of her birth. This was supposedly the most important birthday there was—at least until the one two years down the line. The one that usually got earmarked by some huge party, complete with a frilly cake, dozens of guests, and if the guest of honor was especially lucky, the keys to a brand-new sportscar parked outside at the curb.

That wasn't anywhere near the case with Will. Susan Vandom had always talked about throwing such a party for her Poopy Pumpkin, but Will had always been dead set against it. She'd never been comfortable having that kind of attention foisted upon her. Something her fellow Guardians knew, which hadn't stopped them from throwing a surprise shindig for her birthday three years earlier. Fortunately there wasn't any danger of a repeat incident, as it was a school night and they all had other things to do. Taranee was holed up studying for the SATs. Cornelia was stuck at home baby-sitting her sister while her parents went to some corporate gala, and Irma had offered to bring Chris over, suggesting they could kill two brats with one stone—er, that was, keep them occupied while they ordered pay-per-view and takeout from the Silver Dragon. And Hay Lin was going to the movies with a couple of girls from her printmaking class, an offer she'd extended to Will, who'd declined, as she'd already had long-standing plans to go out to dinner with Matt.

_Matt. _Her slightly improved mood sagged again at the reminder of her boyfriend. She'd been telling herself she should cut him some slack lately—the band took up virtually all of his free time, and after all, she wasn't being as supportive as she could have. But all day, there had been nothing. No note stuck into her locker, no gift upon her desk in homeroom. She'd caught a brief flash of him at lunch before he'd ducked out with his friends, most likely to go rehearse in the band room before their gig that night. Will had spent the entire period trying not to cry into her tray of congealed beef stroganoff, while Hay Lin and Taranee offered her sympathetic looks and Cornelia patted her hand, attempting to hit Irma with the free one when the brunette opened her mouth to apply some unkind epithet to Matt.

Which was why after school, she'd run straight to the park, not waiting up for anybody, and had used the Heart of Kandrakar to open a pulsing blue portal.

The Guardians' duties had diminished considerably in the last couple of years, ever since Elyon had been restored to the throne and her brother's shadow finally expunged from the land. No longer were they making nightly dashes through a rent in the Veil to halt evil on the other side, managing to squeeze in daily realm-defending between dates and algebraic equations. They just weren't needed. Now their visits had dwindled to once or twice monthly, if that—more often for Cornelia, who not only paid regular visits to Elyon at the palace to have dinner and gossip, but also had a boyfriend who happened to reside there.

Caleb had finally moved out of Hay Lin's basement a short while after Phobos's defeat and returned home to considerable accolades from the commonfolk of Meridian—only to end up working as an unpaid laborer for many of them. After all, he'd explained, there wasn't much for a rebel leader to do when there wasn't anything to rebel against. And although the formerly-oppressed populace had had more than two years to separate them from Phobos's unforgiving rule, they were by no means out of the woods yet. Homes still needed to be rebuilt and crops replanted. The recovery would take a long time, and Caleb intended to be part of it. Will found it admirable. She'd have expected nothing less from the iron-willed young rebel, who had been unfailingly at the Guardians' side during their crusade against Phobos. But when she had mentioned that to Cornelia, the prim blonde had seemed annoyed for some reason.

Perhaps they were hitting a rough patch. It must be hard, Will thought, trying to maintain a relationship when the two involved parties lived in parallel worlds. Compared to what Cornelia and Caleb had probably had to deal with over their three-year courtship, this latest thing with Matt was inconsequential. Will sincerely hoped that to be the case, and resolved to push it out of her mind for the time being as she walked through the knee-high grass of the Meridian flatlands. She'd come here for just a little reprieve. Just a couple of hours to put things in perspective before returning home to the "real" world.

The sun was beginning a slow descent toward the horizon, and the rich golden light illuminated the fields of wheat surrounding her, which were still being tended to by tirelessly working farmers. Several young children scurried about, carrying ceramic jugs of water to the men in the field. Will smiled, the day's earlier drama fading from her thoughts as she considered that even something as simple as the idyllic scene before her couldn't have taken place before the Heart of Kandrakar had passed to her hands. Some of the kids stared at her as she passed by, though she was fairly sure none recognized her as the winged leader of the Guardians. Which she wouldn't have wanted, anyway.

A modest yet sprawling structure with a thatched roof loomed before her, flanked by a stable and grain silo. Will swallowed, considering stopping there to ask for water—she hadn't had anything to drink since lunch and Meridian's unusually warm weather, hardly like that of Heatherfield in January, wasn't helping her growing thirst. Finally shedding her winter coat, she tried to make out if anyone was moving about the property, then finally spotted a figure leaving the grain silo with a heavy burlap sack under either arm.

A really…familiar figure.

"Caleb!" she called out gratefully, waving. The young man glanced up, visibly startled at the sound of her voice, and promptly dropped the load he was carrying. "Oops," Will muttered under her breath, and rushed over to help him.

"What's going on, Will?" he asked, eyebrows furrowing in seriousness. "Is something wrong? Where are the others?"

"No, nothing's wrong," Will insisted, who halted in staring at him instead of moving to grasp the sack of grain at her feet. She hadn't looked at him…_really _looked at him, in a long while and was stricken by how much he'd changed from the indignant fifteen-year-old who'd caught her in his arms at the bottom of an oubliette. Caleb was almost nineteen now and stood taller, prouder somehow. His musculature had always been defined, but now it stood out even more prominently beneath his snug-fitting shirt. His eyes no longer blazed with righteous anger toward a brutal regime, but instead smoldered with a different fire, that spoke of his love and utter dedication to his homeland and fellow people.

_Smoldering_. Huh. She'd never thought of that particular verb in conjunction with Caleb before and wondered what he'd think of it. She had a fair idea of what Cornelia would have thought of her saying so.

Caleb lifted an eyebrow at the frozen Will as he hoisted a sack over one shoulder. "You sure? You're just…standing there."

"Huh? Oh, yeah." She quickly bent over to lift the other sack, hoping the brief flicker of embarrassment would disappear from her face by the time she stood up. "No, I'm here by myself. I just needed to…you know…get away from things for a while. Clear my head. Forget about turning sixteen."

She cringed. That last part had just slipped out, and it was too much to hope for that the boy beside her would let it slip past. Caleb's face lit up.

"Of course! This is the time of year your people call January, right? I remember, your birthday was in January…January nineteenth."

Will nodded feebly. "Today." _He remembers, _she thought, her mood quickly sliding into despair again. _He remembers, and Matt apparently doesn't._

"I remember that because of the carving," Caleb continued, carrying his sack of grain without any visible effort as Will struggled a few feet behind him. "I was afraid I wouldn't finish it in time for your party. It was really hard to find the dragon scales on such short notice, especially when you have to barter twenty gingarets for them from some shifty-eyed Zytherian. But your wings wouldn't have looked right without them."

That, Will thought, was quite possibly the sweetest thing he'd ever said to her, even if it wasn't entirely coherent. She wasn't exactly sure how to respond, so she ended up changing the subject. "I didn't know you were working here now," she said, continuing to hobble along behind him. "Do you move around a lot?"

"I go where I'm needed," he answered matter-of-factly. "This is a hoogong ranch owned by an old friend of mine—another retired rebel, actually. Built it with his own two hands after we ousted Phobos, but now he's hard up for hired hands, so I told him I'd stay on for a while and help with the grunt work."

"I see…why they call it…_grunt_ work," Will panted as she gratefully dropped the load of grain once they'd reached the stables and rubbed at her sore arms.

Caleb laughed. "I'd give you the grand tour, except I'd never get done with the chores before nightfall. But you can hang out here while I feed them, if you want."

Will grinned back. "Sounds like a plan. Is there any way I could beg a glass of water off you?"

While Caleb was drawing water from the nearby well, Will perched herself on a wooden beam amid the curious stares of several hoogongs. The constant physical labor aspect didn't thrill her, but she could see why Caleb chose to make this his calling now. Meridian was finally returning to a land of peace and prosperity. The Guardians had merely enabled the change, but Caleb was the one who was actually helping to change it. It had to be really rewarding, she thought, gazing out at the farmers tending to their fields in the distance.

"You know, there isn't a day they don't speak of the Guardians—and what you've done for everyone."

Caleb was standing beside her again, holding a small ceramic jug as he followed her gaze. She thanked him as she accepted it and swallowed half its contents in one swig.

"Hey, we were just doing our job," Will smiled sheepishly, a little floored by the idea anyone would speak of her with any sort of reverence whatsoever. "But I think that job's done now. They don't really seem to need us anymore."

"Of course they will," Caleb stated forcefully as he lifted the sack Will had dropped and carried it inside the stable. "Meridian—_oof_—will _always_ need the Guardians. Remember, your duty is to protect the Veil. Things might be quiet around here, but it can still be breached from the outside."

Will turned to watch him for a moment, as he stretched his arms over his head and moved to crack his neck. His shirt clung to him in several spots, darkened by the efforts of hard labor outside. She flushed, realizing she'd been staring at the small of his back for a couple of minutes already and quickly averted her eyes. _Thank God Cornelia isn't around to see you staring at her man like this. Even though it doesn't mean anything. Nope, nothing at all. Just needed a place to rest my eyes, and…he was in the way._

"So, what does Cornelia think about your new life as a day laborer?" she asked lightly, by way of saving face.

Much to her surprise, Caleb pulled a grimace at the mention of the Earth Guardian and his longtime girlfriend. "She doesn't. She actually scolded me for not taking the position Queen Elyon offered. Said that not only was I being ungrateful, I had to be crazy to want to do this instead."

Will's eyes widened, aware she'd unintentionally hit a nerve. She did know Elyon had offered to make Caleb the captain of the Meridian royal guard, in exchange for his past service in helping remove Phobos from the throne, but he had declined. She hadn't been clear on the details, though. Well, this latest information certainly helped shed light on why Cornelia had been wearing an expression indicative of severe indigestion whenever the subject of her boyfriend came up.

"I can't explain it to her," Caleb continued, as he tore open a sack of grain with a short knife. "If she'd even listen to me. Every time we're together she starts talking about something called the SAT bearing down on her head. I assume that's one of your native Earth monsters. And some medical condition she has called 'premature senioritis.' I don't know why she doesn't just see a healer about it, if it's that bad—"

Caleb stopped when he realized Will was laughing, and narrowed his eyes.

"I'm sorry," Will giggled, wiping the corner of her eye before moving on. "Really. I'm done now. But…Cornelia's probably just thinking of the last time you did hard labor for a living—when Cedric chained you to the rock pile."

"_That_ was different," Caleb huffed as he filled a wooden trough with grain. "Sario was slaving beside me at the quarry, too. Now he owns this place. I'm doing it to help him out. I'm better put to use out here, helping _my_ people get back on their feet, than cooped up in a palace giving orders. Even if it meant I'd have a better wardrobe…and that Cornelia would be proud of me," he added darkly.

"Caleb! That's not true!" Will stared at him, aghast at his sudden candor. "I _know_ she's proud of you."

"Yeah, well, sometimes I wonder," Caleb muttered, barely glancing at the hoogong who had sidled up beside him in order to get first crack at the trough. "And I'm sure she wonders, too. What it would be like to have a boyfriend who understands her Earth jokes and doesn't show up for a date smelling like the inside of a hoogong stable. Maybe if I knew how to slay the SAT creature…"

It took every ounce of Will's self-control to not laugh at that last bit. "You're wrong," she said firmly, keeping the corner of her mouth in check. "She's so lucky to have you. Any girl would be lucky to have you."

There was silence, then Caleb's eyes rose, little by little, to meet Will's. "Any girl?" he asked quietly.

Heat rushed into Will's cheeks, staining them the color of her hair. "Uh, yeah, of course!" she heard herself babble. "You're really good to have around in a tight spot." She tried not to look at Caleb's quizzical expression. "And you tend not to let things like rampaging hordes of ogres get in your way. And you don't forget things like…like birthdays…"

She faltered here, hoping Caleb wouldn't somehow pick up on her unfinished train of thought. Of course, he did.

"If it's your birthday, Will, where's Matt?" One eyebrow arched. "Did he forget?"

His bluntness was one of his best qualities, Will thought, as well as one of his worst. "No, no, of course not." She forced a nervous little laugh. "We're, uh, we're going out to dinner later. It's just, you see, that his band had this really big gig tonight. You know, record industry guy in the audience and everything. So I'm sure it kind of got pushed out of his mind—temporarily. It's, you know, it's nothing."

"Which is why you're here with me and not him," Caleb countered, frowning, despite the fact that he clearly didn't believe her for a second, or know what the words "record industry" or "gig" meant.

"Ummm…yeah. Well. Anyway. I should probably be heading home now. Gotta get ready!" She flashed him a bright smile that was in no way indicative of her true mood. "Well, I'll see you later, Caleb, I—"

"Will. Wait." Caleb stood up suddenly, rifling through his pockets as he did so. "I have something for you."

_Oh, no. _A present. He'd actually gotten her a present when Matt hadn't. Had he just been saving it all this time, on the off chance he happened to see her on her birthday? Will bit her lip, watching Caleb extract a linen-wrapped package no bigger than his thumb from his right hip pocket, which he handed to her. "Caleb, you didn't—" she mumbled, but he appeared not to hear her.

"It's not as nice as the one you've already got, and it certainly doesn't have the traditional value or class of a chicken-skin hat, but maybe it'll…how does Cornelia say it…_go_ with something. I never really understood that phrase. Anyway, you don't have to open it now. Do it later. When you're celebrating."

Will looked blankly from the tiny bundle to Caleb's expectant face, and swallowed, vaguely aware of something like her heart having suddenly lodged in her throat. "Thanks, Caleb," she managed, her voice cutting out a little. "I really…uh…thanks."

And she had to fight the urge to close her eyes, so she wouldn't have to see Caleb regarding her with those suddenly strange eyes. They were wistful and resigned and maybe the teeniest little bit hopeful, and that was terrifying, because he'd never looked at her that way. Never looked at her as anything other than the leader of the Guardians or a short redhead with an attitude.

He opened his mouth to speak, and Will's fear suddenly manifested as prickles on the back of her neck. _It's nothing, stupid. He's probably just going to wish you happy birthday._

Instead, he offered her a somber smile. "Good luck, Will."

Will tried to return the smile, but found herself running as fast as she could across the flatlands of Meridian, a wad of linen clenched tightly in her fist, and didn't stop until she was on the other side of a portal.

* * *

"Would you like another order of breadsticks, madam?"

The waiter was clearly not pleased with Will's taking advantage of the free-breadsticks policy, judging by his disdainful tone of voice. Will sighed and propped her chin in one hand. "No, thanks. Just another glass of water, please."

"I'll replenish your lemon slice while I'm at it," the waiter replied dryly, lifting her glass from the table and striding off. Will stared morosely after him. She hadn't wanted to order until Matt showed up, and now she was so full of garlic bread and tap water that she didn't want to at all. Well, maybe a wedge of tiramisu to top it off. She deserved _that _much, at least.

She pulled her cell phone from her purse one more time, pinky finger tapping the dangling frog charm as she listened to the recorded voicemail greeting again. "_Hey, it's Matt. Sorry I missed your call. You know what to do."_

Except she didn't, anymore. "Hey, Matt…it's me again. Um…they stop serving at ten o'clock, and it's nine-twenty-seven now, so if you can get down here in fifteen minutes we can still manage to…" Will shook her head, snapping the phone shut with another sigh. "Never mind."

_I should've stayed home and had that lame party that Mom always wanted me to have. I should've taken Hay Lin up on her offer to go to the movies. I should've gone over to Taranee's and crammed for the math portion of the SATs. Even her trying to explain trigonometric functions for the eighty-millionth time would've been more fun than this._

_I…I should've spent the evening with Caleb instead._

Dropping the phone back in, she fished the package out and turned it over in her fingers. Since she didn't foresee any actual celebrating tonight, she might as well go ahead. Fingers fumbling nervously with the rough plant-fiber twine, she finally unrolled the piece of cloth to reveal a teardrop-shaped stone, pink-and-white marbled with tiny black veins. The stone was polished smooth and a hole had been drilled at the top, through which a thin leather cord had been laced. A necklace.

_It's not as nice as the one you already have…_He must mean the Heart of Kandrakar, Will thought, feeling a little amused at the notion of the Heart being a mere accessory. The feeling of amusement was quickly engulfed by a greater sensation of burgeoning unease. Guys usually didn't give girls who weren't their girlfriends jewelry. Especially when said guys already had girlfriends, and said girls had their own boyfriends.

But maybe that unspoken rule didn't apply in Meridian. There were a lot of Earth rules that didn't apply when Caleb was involved. After all, a girl usually didn't spend part of her sixteenth birthday alone with a guy who wasn't her boyfriend, when she already had one. But it was different for her, Will told herself. She and Caleb were friends. Had been for years. It was okay.

Friends. Nothing more.

Will slipped the necklace over her head and stared out the nearby window at the glittering lights of downtown as the waiter returned with her water. "Are you ready to order yet, madam?" he prompted dutifully, not even moving for his order pad this time.

She fingered the stone and half-smiled ruefully at him. "Tiramisu, please."

"Very good," the waiter muttered before beating a hasty retreat. Will found herself alone again, fiddling with her necklace and mulling over her extremely jumbled thoughts of a certain former rebel leader, staring at the skyline until her eyes began to water. Meridian was only a Heart's throw away, but it felt like a million miles.

"Happy birthday, Will," she whispered to herself.


	2. Liberation Number 1

**Beautiful Collision**  
"Liberation #1"

* * *

A week and a day after Will's birthday found Caleb not mucking out the stalls of a hoogong stable, but rather sitting in Cornelia Hale's room on Earth, feeling vaguely bored. He was waiting for her to make herself "presentable"—something else he'd never understood, as the way Earth girls painted colorful stripes over their eyes only made them look like ancient warriors preparing for battle. Caleb usually sat on her bed whenever this ritual was taking place, but this time, it made him uncomfortable for some reason, so he'd opted for the desk chair. 

There was a thick, dog-eared tome entitled "SAT Study Guide" upon her desk, and he began flipping though it, intrigued—but it was full of descriptions of strange things like dangling participles and diagrams of Xs and Ys. It didn't look like much of a battle plan to him. Nor was it enough to hold his interest. Instead he found himself thinking about the fact that he and Cornelia had probably said ten words to each other since they'd met up this evening. That was getting to be more of a common occurrence, the two of them finding little to say when they managed to find themselves alone together. Yet when he'd found himself alone with a certain redhead, he'd barely been able to shut up.

Oh, he'd _wanted_ to say more to Will. He'd wanted to tell her everything about himself and Cornelia, all about the door-slamming and barely averted fights in public (whether that public was a Meridian tavern or the movieplex in Heatherfield) and the number of times he'd lingered pathetically in a phone booth on the street in front of her building, waiting for her to look out the window and let him know everything was all right. Because if she was allowed to vent to Elyon—and Caleb knew she did, on a regular basis—then it was only fair that _he _have a sounding board as well. And, well, there wasn't really anyone in Meridian with a sympathetic understanding of semi-hysterical teenaged girls from Earth.

He'd wanted to tell her the truth of the situation, the other reason he'd turned down Elyon's promotion. That he couldn't take being in such close proximity to Cornelia on a regular basis anymore. It was absolutely true that his main interest in life now was restoring the livelihood of the commonfolk, but it hadn't been the only deciding factor for him.

Elyon had been understanding. She knew the scope of the devastation her brother had wrought upon her kingdom—after all, she'd helped to wreak it. And Cornelia knew it too, having been one of the party instrumental in bringing Phobos down. But that didn't keep Cornelia from taking his refusal as a personal slight to her best friend, and, by proxy, an insult to Cornelia herself.

He'd wanted to unburden himself when Will had prompted him with the mention of his girlfriend. He trusted Will, probably well more than she realized—after all, she was usually the first to lend an hand and then an arm when he'd gotten himself mired in something or other. But she was also Cornelia's friend and fellow Guardian. Who also happened to be a girl. Caleb had learned fairly quickly that Earth girls tended to band together and take each other's side in such situations, invariably leaving any males out in the cold.

So he'd kept himself in check. And he'd listened to Will, and discovered that all was apparently not perfect in the world of Will and Matt Olsen, either. Caleb had never been especially fond of the guy; he'd been a hindrance, an interference at a crucial time in the past, and he'd distracted Will from her Guardian duties in the process. But he made Will happy, so let bygones be bygones, right?

That no longer appeared to be the case. Will had fibbed to him, tried to save face, but it was about as futile as stoking the fires on an already sinking ship. She was miserable. She'd run away from her own _birthday_ to try and escape her misery. And Caleb had found himself quite suddenly wanting to remedy it. Depression did not suit the brave and often stubborn leader of the Guardians. Especially when it concerned some nancy Earth boy who wasn't even worthy of her.

So he'd given her the pendant, still wrapped as he'd done it months ago now, watching those eyes—like rich loam, the reddest shade of tilled earth—for a change, even a subtle one. And she'd ended up running like mad, as if she couldn't put enough distance between herself and him.

Well-handled. He'd been pretty damn presumptuous in gifting her with something forged by his hand that he'd once intended to give Cornelia. He probably wasn't even on her list of Ten People You'd Most Like To Share An Oubliette With—well, not the top five, anyway. And he was giving her jewelry. No wonder she hadn't returned to Meridian in the time since. His only solitary visit from Will so far would no doubt be his last.

Cornelia sauntered back into the room, surrounded by a cloud of some kind of flowery essence that made his nose itch. She hadn't changed all that much in the last couple of years, he thought. Still willowy, blonde, and impossibly beautiful—with extra emphasis on the "impossible" part. With eyes like frost and a tongue sharper than a chisel when she was displeased. Her taste in perfume had gotten worse, though.

He was aware of all her faults and yet, he still loved her. Or at least, he thought that had been the case. Now he wondered at the truth of it.

"Be glad _you _don't have to bother with that," she said, noticing the SAT book propped open before him, which he'd stopped perusing almost as soon as he'd begun. "I know I'm going to flub it big time. I just hope my parents aren't too dead set on the Ivy League. I probably won't even get into Brown."

Three years interacting with the people of Earth, Caleb thought, and half the time he still had no clue as to what they were talking about. They shared a common tongue, and yet there remained a language barrier. He'd mentioned that to Taranee at some point or other in time, and she'd responded with a long-winded answer about "Mexican Spanish" and "Spaniard Spanish" that had left him even more confused. He decided not to press Cornelia for clarification—something in her face told him that Brown was not an enemy encampment or a monster's lair, and that if he inquired about it, she'd end up huffing at him for his foolishness.

She was still talking, anyway. "I can barely find any time to study, what with homework and the school play and trying to keep Will from getting all hysterical every time she calls…"

Caleb's head snapped up to attention. "Will?" he repeated.

"Yeah, she broke up with Matt," Cornelia answered distractedly, now pushing aside hangers in her closet. Luckily she hadn't noticed his sudden interest at the mention of her friend. "Or he broke up with her. Half the time she's blubbering and I can't make out what she's saying. All I really know is they agreed to 'take a break'. She's all torn up over it, though. She keeps talking about wanting to work it out with him—"

"Why would she want to do _that?_" Caleb heard himself say, a tide of disdain swelling within him as he slammed the book shut. "After what he did to her on her birthday? He's not good enough for her."

He didn't fully realize what he'd said until Cornelia turned around to face him, a purple sweater clutched in her hands. Her knuckles had turned white around the hanger.

"How did you know about that?" she asked slowly. "You haven't been back here since then."

_Uh-oh._ "No…I haven't," he faltered, but truthfully.

"Then how did you know what happened on Will's birthday?" Pale blue eyes glazed over with frost. _Displeased_ would be the understatement of the year, Caleb thought.

"Because she told me." There was no point in trying to evade the truth, he told himself, especially when the truth was nothing to be ashamed of. "She tore a new portal to Meridian on her birthday and found me at the ranch. It was a coincidence. She needed to talk, so we talked."

"A coincidence." Cornelia exhaled through her nostrils. "Out of all the places in Meridian a portal could have randomly dumped her, it just happened to to dump her in front of you. That's pretty amazing."

He was not going to engage her this time. He was tired of this; this constantly putting himself on the defensive every time her suspicions were raised. "Yeah, it is pretty amazing," he replied in an almost nonchalant tone, which appeared to make her even angrier. Bright spots of color glowed on her high cheekbones.

"Well, she does have four very good friends right here on Earth. Any one of whom would be more than happy to lend a shoulder for her to cry on. Why she had to go all the way to Meridian for moral support, I can't understand." Cornelia's hands were planted so firmly on her hips, Caleb wondered if she might have bruises tomorrow.

"She said she needed to get away from things for a little while and forget about her birthday. She wouldn't even talk about Matt until I pried it out of her. She was more interested in listening to my problems." Caleb decided not to give her a chance to ask what these problems were. "What should I have done, told her to get lost? Will's my friend too, Cornelia. She's lent me a hand more times than I can count; the least I can do is give her one back."

Cornelia turned back to the closet, busying herself with clothes-arranging once more. No longer being able to gauge what sort of dangerous territory he was heading into by her facial expressions made Caleb uneasy. It was like fumbling through thick fog when you were feet away from the edge of a cliff.

"You know, Will got a really interesting birthday present." _Clack. Clack. _The wooden hangers sounded in protest as Cornelia continued shunting them to one side of the closet, a note of false cheer in her voice barely keeping the acid from boiling over. "It's this pendant that looks kind of like that one rock you were always playing with. The one you picked up in the quarry when you were on Cedric's chain gang."

_Yeah, the pendant I made for you. And it was a worry stone, not a plaything. _He couldn't remember now why he'd hesitated to give it to her in the first place. He guessed they must have been having a fight at the time, and afterward he'd just been waiting for the right time to give it to her. And then, when Will had been standing in front of him…it had _seemed_ right, for some reason. The wrong girl at the right time. Or was it the other way around? "That's what Taria riverstone is mostly used for," he answered noncommittally, wondering whether or not Will had told Cornelia everything, and if she was just baiting him to see if he'd lie his way out of it. "Ornamental purposes."

"She said she got it at a flea market."

Caleb silently thanked Will, while at the same time feeling a little offended that his handiwork was only good enough for the junk stalls Earth people called "flea markets," which never sold fleas. _No, I'm sure that's not what Will meant. She did say you were talented, once…_

"And I can't help but wonder," Cornelia said in an increasingly terse voice, finally banging the closet door shut and turning to face her boyfriend once more, "how she managed to find a piece of Meridian jewelry at a flea market in Heatherfield. Because the odds are _kind _of astronomical."

Her glare was challenging, and Caleb found himself glaring back, unflinching. So what if he confessed, he thought. It didn't mean anything. It didn't mean he had feelings for Will besides the ones he'd always had—deep-seated feelings of protectiveness and camaraderie. He harbored those for each of the Guardians. Hay Lin had become like a little sister to him during his time living in her basement. Taranee had the greatest tendency of all of them to flinch in the face of danger and sometimes needed his protection, despite being far more powerful than he himself was. And Irma—well, she neither wanted nor needed the protection, but she was lively and honest and the sort of person you were glad to have at your back. He cared for all of them.

But it was Will he'd met first, and Will whom he'd counted as a friend first, in spite of their somewhat strained first meeting. So, sure, Will sort of had pride of place in his affections. _Platonic_ affections, he reminded himself.

There just wasn't any way to make Cornelia understand that, though. So he kept his mouth shut.

Cornelia's hard gaze remained on him for a few moments, apparently waiting for something incriminating to slip from his mouth, and only backpedaling when nothing did. "So, are you staying at this ranch or what?" she asked, settling cross-legged onto the bed, facing him. "Because _this_…is getting kind of hard."

Caleb silently agreed. There was one portal between Earth and Meridian the Guardians allowed to remain open; one that linked Elyon's palace to Cornelia's basement, for rendezvous purposes. Three years ago it would've been far too risky to leave a tear in the Veil unchecked, but Elyon had guards posted round-the-clock at her end and Cornelia had told Lilly that the basement was crawling with brown recluse spiders, so as keep her from nosing around. There hadn't been any problems…other than the fact that the farther Caleb wandered, the more difficult and time-consuming it got to make the trip to the palace. Particularly when he felt doing so to be more of an obligation than anything else.

"I'll stay until I'm not needed anymore," Caleb said flatly, well aware of the irritation flaring up in Cornelia's eyes. "Then I'll move on to somewhere else. I've already told you this."

"And where does that leave _us?_" Cornelia demanded suddenly. "I never know where you are. Every time we want to see each other, we have to plan it three weeks in advance! I can't just get together with my boyfriend after school like every other girl. I have to sit there by myself like some complete reject because he's off—building _mud huts_ or something deep in the jungle primeval—"

He couldn't believe how selfish she could be sometimes. "I'm doing what _needs_ to be done," Caleb snapped, standing up so as to give himself a temporary advantage. "You think that just because we toppled an evil empire, everything's automatically going to be fine? My people are still starving and homeless, Cornelia, almost _three years_ after the fact. And if that means wandering from village to village for the rest of my life, slaving and getting my hands dirty until that's not the case anymore, then that's what I'm going to do."

Cornelia just sat there seething, teeth slightly bared as if she were on the verge of gnashing them. Caleb pushed on, not entirely certain of the words coming out of his mouth, but certain that they needed to be said.

"And if you wanted to be like every other girl, you shouldn't have picked a guy from a different world. There are probably a thousand guys here on Earth who'd throw themselves at the opportunity to be at your beck and call. But I'm not going to do that. I have other obligations beside you. And if you want to be with me, you're going to have to deal with that."

There was a deafening silence. Caleb could feel the blood pounding in his ears from his unexpected outburst.

"So," Cornelia said in a low voice. "I'm just one of your obligations, huh?"

Had he really said it out loud? "I—I didn't mean it like that," Caleb faltered. _Sure you didn't._

"Oh, sure you didn't. Fine. I understand. Well, you don't have to worry about that anymore," Cornelia spat, long cornsilk hair swishing violently as she leapt off the bed and gestured toward her bedroom door. "Your final obligation to me, Caleb, will be to get the hell out of my house. Likewise, don't expect me to be looking for you at the palace three weeks from now."

"Don't worry," Caleb said, narrowing his eyes. "Even if you look, you'll never find me. Ever again."

And with that, he stormed out of Cornelia's room, down the stairs, out the front door and was all the way to the sidewalk when he realized that the only way back to Meridian happened to be behind the door he'd just slammed, in Cornelia's basement. He felt like kicking himself.

_I guess going back now would kind of ruin the effectiveness of my storming out, huh?_

He glanced up at Cornelia's window. Sure enough, she was watching; but she scowled and yanked the curtains shut the moment she noticed him looking. Caleb scowled back into the night, wondering how on Earth he was supposed to get home now, then realized that there was one more option. One who hopefully wouldn't slam the door in his face; who might even be glad to see him.

He took off in the direction of Will's apartment.

* * *

A/N: This was going to be a much longer chapter, but the second half just WILL NOT END, so I thought I'd put this up for now. 

Taria riverstone is actually a deliberate reference to Hayao Miyazaki's _Nausicaä_ manga; it's what Nausicaä's earrings are made from. And hey, I liked the name. :)

Thanks for the reviews; feedback is always appreciated!


	3. Exes and Whys

**Beautiful Collision**  
"Exes and Whys"

* * *

Will was lying flat on her back on the bed, feet propped upon the pillow as she dangled Caleb's birthday present over her head, letting the stone sway like a pendulum from side to side. Self-hypnosis was her last resort for getting any sleep tonight. Well, actually, raiding her mother's medicine cabinet was the last resort, but she really wasn't angling to go that far. 

Her algebra text was propped open upon her desk, alongside a fresh piece of notebook paper and a pencil. None of it had been touched all evening, sticking her with the joyous task of finishing twenty equations sometime between breakfast and homeroom tomorrow. She couldn't help it. She just hadn't felt like doing much since the big fight—much of _anything, _really.

_I think we should take a break, _Matt had said to her, avoiding looking her directly in the eye all the while. And that had been it. No promises to call, no agreements to pick things up again a couple of weeks down the line. No guarantees. No good-byes. Just a broken…_thing_ hanging there, not quite severed, but a long way from being whole. Like a hangnail.

A _hangnail?_ Will almost giggled in spite of herself at the ridiculous analogy. Not only was the break-up fallout making her listless, but it was also apparently scrambling her brain.

Her friends were, for the most part, making valiant efforts to keep her distracted. This afternoon Hay Lin had roped her into helping fold at least a thousand crepe-paper flowers for the Chinese New Year Parade float the Silver Dragon was sponsoring, and while her fingers would probably permanently be stained fuchsia, it had certainly gotten her mind off Matt for a few hours, as well as all the free dim sum she could eat. The day before, Irma had somehow talked her into crashing a LAN party that Martin was hosting, which had culminated in the two of them fleeing into the night and giggling madly while a Silly-String-covered-Martin yelled to Irma that he'd send the cops after her ("I _live_ with the cops!" Irma had shouted back triumphantly in response. "Do your worst, Tubbsy!")

Taranee, meanwhile, had brought her a new book to help pass the time: _Why Men Are Scum. _"I'd wanted to get you one on Su Doku," she'd said apologetically, scratching her head, "but the salesgirl said this was the most therapeutic for the newly dumped. You know, in retrospect, she did seem kind of angry…"

And Cornelia…well, Cornelia had been willing to listen, offering an ear to bend over the phone now and again, but ultimately Will thought she was probably too preoccupied with her own issues with Caleb to pay much heed to Will's. Or maybe the pendant had something to do with it. The blonde had raised an eyebrow when she'd fibbed to the others about where she'd gotten it from, and had cast it a number of lingering sideways glances that made Will uncomfortable. She'd finally ended up taking it off and sticking it in her pocket.

It made for a pretty good worry stone, although her fingertips on the smooth surface would invariably lead her back to that same sunset. That same strange, oddly soft look in Caleb's eyes that had made her run for her life.

She wondered if he'd even realized the way he'd been looking at her. Maybe he'd been imagining Cornelia in her place. _Yeah._ That made a lot more sense. He hardly could have been looking at short, redheaded, perpetual-screwup, how-did-this-chick-become-leader tomboy Will, who was everything he didn't want in a girl—in fact, practically the polar opposite of the one he had.

_Still doesn't explain why he gave me this, though. _Will watched the stone swing closer to her nose, her eyelids fluttering just a little. _Maybe he decided it wasn't good enough for Cornelia. Or maybe he just felt sorry for me._ She closed her eyes for just a moment, a grainy impression of the ex-rebel leader hovering in her mind. _That…has to be it…_

A trio of muffled thumps brought her swiftly back to consciousness. It sounded like someone knocking at the front door, Will thought, sitting up abruptly as she pulled the necklace back over her head. But it was almost nine o'clock, which pretty much ruled out her friends—unless it was Irma, frantically looking to copy her history questions _again_ because she'd been pranking Martin on the phone all night and hadn't remembered her homework until it was almost time for bed…

Or maybe, just maybe…it was Matt. Maybe with a bunch of flowers, or maybe just one—yeah, one would look more pathetic. One wilting carnation. Dripping wet from wandering slick streets outside in the—wait, it wasn't raining, but still. The flower was enough. He'd have a regretful puppy-dog expression on his face… Will sprang off the bed, a surge of hope in her heart, and was about to throw open the door to her bedroom when she heard her mother's voice.

"Well…yes, she's here. But she's asleep, I think. Ah, may I ask, exactly _how_ long have you known Will? You're not one of Matt's friends, are you?"

"No. I'm not." Familiar, male, and most emphatic in tone. Will's eyebrows shot up nearly to her hairline. What was _he_ doing _here?_ Now, of all times? "I've known Will since she first became a G—uh, I mean, since she first moved here. I used to work at the Lins' restaurant."

"Oh, that's right. I remember Hay Lin saying something about having a boarder who worked for them," Susan's thoughtful voice drifted through the door. "An older boy. You…you're not in _college_, are you?"

_God, no, she's going into Overprotective Mommy Mode again! T-minus seven seconds until she starts demanding to know what his intentions are for me! _Will flung the door open and darted into the kitchen, bare feet almost skidding on the linoleum. "Hi, Caleb," she blurted out. "Um…thanks for bringing my keys over. I can't believe I left them at Hay Lin's _again_."

_Keys? _mouthed a bewildered Caleb to Will, who nodded frantically. "Uh…no problem," he said slowly.

Susan glanced from her latest unsuspecting victim to her daughter, her hard expression of appraisal softening into a smile. "I thought you were going to bed, Will," she said innocently, taking a sip from the coffee mug in her right hand as she gestured with the other to Will's nighttime ensemble of spaghetti-strap camisole and matching print cotton pants, both prominently featuring a cartoon frog with a crown.

A five-alarm blaze raged across Will's cheeks as the scenario sank in. _My mom, Caleb, and me in my frog-prince pajamas. This is officially a nightmare. That's it. If she offers him crackers and Velveeta, you're going kamikaze out the window._

"Not anymore," muttered Will in response to her mother, as she grasped Caleb by the wrist and began pulling him back toward her room. Caleb quirked an eyebrow at her, but allowed himself to be hauled without comment. "Uh, Mom, Caleb and I are just going to talk for a couple of minutes, okay? I know it's a school night and all. He won't stay long."

"Oh, of course," Susan answered, still eyeing Caleb a bit suspiciously from the kitchen counter as she stirred instant creamer into her mug. "Uh, Will, honey, one more thing. If you forgot your keys at Hay Lin's, then how did you get into the apartment this afternoon?"

_Crap. _"Uh…Irma taught me how to jimmy locks," Will called back in what she hoped was a nonchalant tone. "She's picked up a lot of useful tricks from her dad. Sleeper holds, cooking with pepper spray, all that jazz." And with that, she pushed Caleb into her bedroom and shoved the door with her foot, leaning heavily against it once it clicked shut. "I'm sorry," she said somewhat plaintively, gesturing for him to sit. "She _will_ eat you alive, if given the chance."

An almost-smile appeared at the corner of Caleb's mouth as he straddled the back of her desk chair, arms folded across the top rung. "Don't worry about it," he replied. "There are overprotective parents in Meridian too, you know. I'm guessing your mother was about to ask me what my intentions were?"

"Actually…yeah." Will sat back on the bed, surprised. "How'd you guess?"

"Traditional protocol in Meridian. If a guy wants to court a girl, he's obligated to announce his intentions to her parents first. Which usually means getting slammed with questions for the next three hours until they're satisfied he's honorable. Of course, it doesn't happen much anymore. It got kind of hard to observe etiquette and protocol with a war going on."

Will felt herself blushing again at the notion of Caleb asking her mother permission to court her. _God, what a ridiculous idea, _she told herself. "Is that what you did when you and Cornelia started dating?" she asked, a bit teasingly, before recalling that Cornelia was not exactly Caleb's favorite topic these days.

His expression made it clear that that was still very much the case. "I didn't exactly give it that much forethought," he answered, chin drifting down to rest on his folded arms. "We just kind of…jumped into things. Without thinking." His eyes—the most perplexing shade of green Will had ever seen, a shifting kaleidoscope of forest and earth and dew—flickered up to meet hers, and caught on her pendant along the way. "You're wearing it," he said, a note of gratitude in his voice. "I was afraid you wouldn't like it."

Will's hand self-consciously flew up to her neck. "I can't wear it around Cornelia," she admitted. "I didn't want to tell the truth about where I'd gotten it, because I just knew she'd take it the wrong way and flip ou—"

"We broke up," Caleb said, his gaze having fallen to the carpet as she spoke.

Will gaped. "_What?"_

"That's kind of why I'm here. I didn't want to bother you this late, but I didn't think Cornelia would let me back in her house to use her portal, not after I told her I'd never see her again. I thought about rigging open the basement window, but the building has some sort of spell upon it that sets off sirens when you try to break in. We really could've used something like that in the Infinite City, you know?"

Will just sat there, staring, one hand frozen on her collarbone, mouth hanging practically unhinged until she reminded herself to pull it in. Had he actually said what she thought she'd said? In the same breath as discussing the usefulness of a security system in a rebel stronghold?

"You…broke up?" she managed to ask.

Caleb nodded.

"You and Cornelia. Broke up. Tonight." The ability to form complete sentences had apparently gone out back for a smoke break, leaving Will a babbling idiot.

"It was a long time coming, Will," Caleb sighed. "We're not happy. All we do is fight. And…now we won't anymore. She deserves someone who isn't going to treat her like an obligation. Someone who's willing to fall at her feet and come running every time she calls. I just can't do that anymore. It's for the best."

"But…you told her you were never going to see her again? _Ever?_"

"Yeah, well, I kind of regret that part now." Caleb straightened and shrugged his shoulders, letting his arms dangle over the back of the chair. "I didn't mean it. We were just trying to see who could hurt each other more, I guess. Maybe in a month or two she'll be willing to talk to me again. You think?"

Will thought that considering it was Cornelia, O High Priestess of Holding Grudges, that they were talking about, a year or two might be a safer bet, but she didn't say anything. Instead, she remembered where she'd left her hand, and what that thing around her neck was. "It's not because…because of…" she tried to say, but the words wouldn't come for some reason.

"What?" Caleb looked confused for a moment. "No. No, Will, it doesn't have anything to do with the pendant _or _you. Don't worry about it."

"I'm not worried," Will blurted out. "Not at all. I know it doesn't have anything to do with me. I mean, if Cornelia honestly thought—that there was—something—between us, you'd tell her to get her head examined, right?" She didn't stop to notice the way Caleb's eyes seemed to darken at these words, or the way his brow knit in bewilderment. "I mean, we're friends, you and I. We've been friends for a long time. And I've been Matt's girlfriend for a long time. And it was supposed to stay that way." Her voice wavered, dangerously close to cracking into a million shards. "He wasn't supposed to just change as soon as the band took off. He wasn't supposed to start forgetting about me. Letting me sit at a restaurant an hour past closing while I called his phone for the fifteenth time." She kept talking through the tears, now running hot tracks down her face. "Because he never used to be that way, and none of it makes any _sense!"_

The sobs finally ripped loose from her throat as hot saltwater drowned her eyes and stole her vision. Will buried her face in her hands and cried, _really _cried, for the first time since the fight, aware of no sound but the ones issuing from her raw throat.

And then…a weight sank down beside her on the bed, and a pair of strong arms enfolded her, one hand stroking the back of her head, tilting it downward so that Will found her face buried in the crook of Caleb's neck. Her fingers clutched helplessly at his back, grasping a fistful of his shirt while her tears left his collar and shoulder sopping wet. Had Will's head not been spinning faster than Hay Lin after a package of Ring-Dings, she might have had the presence of mind to be embarrassed.

Rather, her mind began drifting to other things. How it felt—_nice_—to be encircled by the protective cocoon of his arms. How hard the planes of his chest and back were from years of fighting and hard work. How he smelled of earth and dry grasses and sunwarmed leather, but nothing at all like a hoogong stable. How from her vantage point on his shoulder, staring past his ear, his hair looked impossibly soft, and how if she reached out to touch it right now, he might not even be bothered…

And suddenly, Will felt something on her forehead, like a hot brand being applied just below her hairline, that sent her crashing quite abruptly back to reality.

He'd kissed her.

Oh, God. He'd _kissed _her.

Granted, it was on the forehead. Her mother kissed her on the forehead. Great-aunts and uncles missing half their teeth who hadn't seen her since she was in training pants kissed her on the forehead. But this was nowhere in the same league. Those familial, vaguely awkward kisses didn't make her heart pound like a hammer, or cause her face—or any other part of her body—to go up in flames.

Will disentangled herself from Caleb and blinked at him through watery red eyes. He looked every bit as stunned with himself as she was.

"Um," Caleb finally said, a minute or so later when he'd regained his voice. "Will, I—I mean, I didn't—"

"No. It's okay," Will interrupted him. "Really."

They sat there, unmoving, in silence for a few moments. The guilty spot on Will's forehead still burned with feverish warmth. She willed herself to return to the train of thought she'd been following, before all logical, sequential thought had just evaporated in the midst of the ex-rebel's comforting embrace.

"The worst part," she said quietly, scuffing patterns with her big toe into the carpet weave, "is wondering if maybe he's already over me, the way you're pretty much already over Cornelia."

She half expected him—no, she _wanted _him to get mad at those words. To puff up with his trademark indignation at her presumption, as the old Caleb would have done. To tell her that just because he didn't wear his heart on his sleeve, that didn't mean it wasn't broken. Most of all, to say _something_ that would make it all untrue, so that tomorrow when they woke up everything would be as it should in the universe, where she was still with Matt and he with Cornelia, and he'd never come here tonight. Where he had never kissed her, and she had never liked it.

But true to form—as he had seemingly been doing so often lately—Caleb did, or rather said, the opposite of what she wanted. His voice was calm, but it held every bit as much conviction as in any speech he'd ever delivered to his troops.

"He doesn't deserve you, Will."

Will just closed her eyes. It was a trap. A test—her eighth grade mythology report, to be exact. It was Orpheus leading Eurydice. If she looked up and met those fugitive green orbs now, she might lose herself forever.

"Then who does?" she whispered.

For one excruciating moment, there was nothing but the pressure of silence on her eardrums. Will's left eye slitted open and caught sight of her opened algebra book on the desk. Constants, she thought. This room was a constant. The walls were still white, the bed still unmade, the floor still littered with magazines and dirty socks. Contrast with the variables. The fluttering of her pulse, the tempo of his breathing, his sudden movement as he rose from the bed and strode to the center of the room.

Variables. Unspooling in her stomach. Clenching in her chest.

"I should probably get going," Caleb said in a strained voice, gaze directed at her bedroom door. "It—it's late, and you've got school tomorrow. I could use some sleep myself…it's been a long night."

Will stared at him for a handful of seconds, then leapt up off the bed and grabbed her coat, pulling one arm through a quilted sleeve and fishing the Heart of Kandrakar from her backpack with the other. "Sure. Right," she babbled nervously. "I'll open the portal for you out in the alley. I don't want my mom barging in here with glasses of Tang and seeing it—she'll never get that stuff out of the carpet."

"Portal? Oh, right. The portal." A brief flicker of confusion passed over Caleb's face, as though he had already completely forgotten why it was he'd come there in the first place. Given the direction the evening had gone, Will thought, that was probably exactly the case.

Will shoved her feet into her frog-face slippers, too preoccupied now to feel embarrassed over Caleb seeing them, and led him out into the hallway. The hissing noise of her mother's shower was barely audible, a reprieve Will gratefully accepted. She led the way down the stairs, slippers flapping against cold cement, not looking back once as Caleb's heavier footfalls sounded behind her. _Orpheus. Turn around and you'll kill him_, she thought absently, then felt like laughing at her suddenly capricious state of mind.

Empty drink cups and old newspapers crunched underfoot as Will held the Heart aloft and closed her eyes, the image of a wheatfield bathed in sunset filling her mind's eye. A rush of cool air and a flash of blinding blue light struck her face as the portal swelled open, tossing her lank red locks every which way. She blinked twice and turned to Caleb. "Unless I somehow screwed up, it should take you back to the ranch."

Caleb turned to face the portal, but made no motion to jump through it. He glanced at Will instead. "You might, uh…not see me for a while," he said in a carefully measured sort of voice. "I'll probably be leaving the ranch pretty soon. I was thinking about heading up north, visiting some of the smaller villages. So don't…don't be surprised if I'm not around."

Will's brow furrowed as she realized he _wasn't_ saying to her. _Don't come looking for me._

_Why would he say that? More importantly, why would he break up with Cornelia, kiss me, and then say that?_

The corner of his mouth tightened, as though trying to suppress something. "I'm…sorry, Will."

_Sorry for what? Sorry you kissed me? Sorry you gave me the pendant? Sorry for confusing the hell out of me? _

And here she'd been thinking he'd changed in the last three years. The guy in front of the portal was every bit as exasperating at the guy at the bottom of the hole. Sure, he was less boastful. And more considerate. And…fine, yeah, he was more attractive, too—not that she'd been paying close attention or anything. But he was still maddening.

And yet…she couldn't get mad. She could only stare blankly back at him, watching the light of the portal refracted in his eyes, like two tiny bobbing lanterns in the darkness. She found she couldn't say anything, either; her mouth felt dry and cottony, as though she'd been chewing a sock.

_Stay,_ was her sudden urge to blurt out, but the words stuck fast to her tongue and were smothered.

Caleb finally broke off the gaze and stepped toward the portal. He glanced over his shoulder one last time, and maybe it was a trick of the light, but she thought she saw a smile there, albeit one tempered with regret. "It'll be okay," she heard him say over the rush of wind whistling through the torn Veil. "I promise."

And then he was gone.

The hand clutching the Heart dropped to Will's side as she squinted into the blue expanse, not noticing the page of classified ads that the wind had plastered to her leg. For one wild instant, she considered following him. Chasing him down and knocking him to the ground amidst the waving golden grasses. Telling him to finish what he'd started. Pressing her lips to his forehead and seeing if he'd follow her lead.

The maverick Will—the one who was wired on lack of sleep and cream buns from the Silver Dragon, who'd felt a shameful little something explode within her at the brush of Caleb's mouth, and who was currently so lightheaded she fancied herself to be Orpheus—was raring to go.

But Will Vandom, who for a week had felt the world would end if she couldn't be Matt Olsen's girl anymore, held up the Heart again and watched the portal collapse into nothingness, and then turned and shuffled out of the alley, feeling nothing at all.

* * *

A/N: I know there has been no "action/adventure" to speak of in a story labeled as such, but it is coming. Hope you don't mind the journey there. :)

Once again, thanks for the reviews; I'm ecstatic you guys are enjoying this. 


	4. Jigsaw Feeling

**Beautiful Collision**  
"Jigsaw Feeling"

* * *

"So, where'd Corny go stomping off to this fine lunch hour?" Irma Lair asked conversationally around a mouthful of chocolate-covered graham cracker. "I was trying to hit her up for the answer to that stupid Caligula question before history, and she just sat there huffing and ignoring me. Somebody's hairdryer must have shorted out again." 

She and the three remaining Guardians were enjoying a sunny, yet still nippy, late January afternoon, situated around a large brick planter, where they'd spread out their lunches. The cafeteria's offense that day was meatloaf (or "food loaf", as it was more commonly called), so most of them had brown-bagged it—save Will, who was so intent on dissecting her mashed potatoes with a plastic spork that she hadn't looked at anyone else for fifteen minutes. Hadn't said anything, either. She hadn't even laughed at Irma's "Grade-F meat" joke. And _everybody_ laughed at the Grade-F meat joke. It was grade-A material. Rimshot!

"First of all, Irma," Taranee Cook interjected as she meticulously peeled the rind off her tangerine, "for someone who keeps insisting that Martin Tubbs is a sociopath in horn-rims, you spend more time talking to him than doing your homework. And secondly, _I_ could've told you the answer to that question! What did you end up putting?"

"Something about him honking on his sisters," was Irma's offhand reply as she crunched into a third cracker. "And I was not talking _to _him, I was talking to his answering machine. And oh, man, you should've heard it! First I pretended to sell him beachfront property in Phoenix, and then—"

"You two have the weirdest foreplay ritual ever," Taranee said calmly as she popped a tangerine segment into her mouth.

Irma choked. Next to her, Hay Lin shrieked so loudly that she dropped her container of cold lo-mein noodles and clapped her hands over her mouth.

"Are you trying to kill me?" Irma gasped, spraying herself with cracker crumbs in the process. Since when had the Guardian of Fire gotten all sassy, anyway? Well, apparently since Ms. The Earth Literally Revolves Around Me was a no-show, and their often sarcastic leader had taken such an interest in her gluey fluorescent gravy. After all, somebody had to make with the cutting rejoinders, and Hay Lin was entirely too sweet to fill that role. "Never, _ever_ mention Martin and me in the same sentence with the f-word. Or the _other_ f-word, for that matter. Unless you fancy a watery demise."

"I'm just sayin'," Taranee smirked behind her bottle of water, feigning innocence. Hay Lin giggled as she stabbed at a straw mushroom with her chopsticks. Will still hadn't looked up from rearranging the so-called comestibles on her tray.

Irma raised an eyebrow at her unusually taciturn friend. "So Will, you have any idea what's wrong with the Queen C?" she prompted, determined to get her speaking one way or another. "Pea under her mattress? Or did she just overpluck her eyebrows again and flee in shame from humankind?"

"She broke up with Caleb," Will answered mechanically, then dropped her spork, looking mildly surprised at her own announcement.

The surprise was much more pronounced on her friends' faces, all of whom gaped at her, mouths hanging open.

"They broke _up?_" Hay Lin exclaimed, sounding scandalized. Irma hoped she'd brought an extra set of chopsticks, because one of them had just taken a flying leap into the shrubbery. "When did that happen?"

"Last night," Will said, looking somewhat uncomfortable as her friends continued staring. "Look…maybe she doesn't want me discussing it with you guys."

"Nonsense. Spill it," Irma declared, leaning forward with hands on knees. "If she can tell _you_ all the gory details, then she has indirectly given her consent to have them made public."

"Well…" Will hunched so far into her shoulders, Irma half expected her head to retreat into her neck cavity. "I…kindasorta didn't hear it from Cornelia."

The three other girls all exchanged a significant glance. "So…you kindasorta heard it from Caleb then?" Taranee inquired, crinkling her brow. "But if it was last night—"

"He came over. He…needed a way home. After the way he left Cornelia's, he figured she probably wasn't going to let him back in to use the portal." Will explained all this in a rush before bending back over her tray and resuming her decapitation of the slab of food loaf with renewed vigor.

"But did he say _why _they broke up?" Hay Lin pressed, looking worried. She'd championed those two from day one, and judging by the alarm on her face now, you'd think the end was nigh, Irma thought. Earthquakes and tsunamis were nothing compared to the harbinger of eternal doom that was the death knell of the Most Perfect Couple Ever.

Irma, however, held no such foolish notions. It wasn't any surprise to _her._ She'd guessed the Big One was about to drop during her and Cornelia's dual baby-sitting gig on Will's birthday. Somewhere between Cornelia whining into the carton of General Tso's Chicken (which she had totally hogged, despite Irma's attempts to get a chopstick in edgewise) about how men were constant disappointments, and her running commentary during the movie about how Vance Michael Justin at least _tried_ to spend time with his girlfriend in the face of invading orc forces…well, Irma had gotten the teensiest whiff that the rose garden was starting to smell like poo.

Frankly, she thought Cornelia and Caleb deserved medals, a ticker-tape parade and a kickline giving a twenty-one-gun salute, for having made it last as long as they did. She'd never really understood what they had in common, other than when Cornelia managed to get Caleb out of his grubby rebel attire and into something of her choosing, they both looked like they'd just jumped off the window placards in the local Gap. Looks. Psh. How could anyone jump into a relationship based on that? You at least needed to like the same kinds of music, or enjoy the same hobbies, or be willing to listen patiently while the other yakked.

Or, failing that, share an appreciation for deranged humor, which explained herself and Martin at any rate—although the word "relationship" in regards to them would be better replaced with "prolonged mutual harassment."

"I'm less interested in the _whys_ as I am the _hows,_" Irma announced, unscrewing the cap off her Yoo-Hoo. "As in, how did it go down, exactly? Was it a 'Dear Caleb' letter? Were there any plants or expensive vases destroyed in the process? I mean, are we talking a mere Three Mile Island here, or a full-on, Slim-Pickens-riding-the-bomb-and-yelling-'Woohoo' thermonuclear _war?_"

"_Irma!"_ Hay Lin rounded on her so fast that Taranee, who was in closer proximity, nearly sustained whiplash from her pigtails. "How can you _say_ something like that? Did you have this much fun when Will and Matt broke up?"

"Of _course_ not," Irma said testily, keeping an eye on her redheaded friend as she sipped. Will's eyes were almost closed, her head drooping like a wilted flower over her mangled lunch. If only she could get a chuckle—or even a trace of a smile—out of her. "For one, I thought _they_ would make it. But just to prove I'm not completely heartless, Hay Lin, I propose a wager, with all proceeds going to charity. I'll put five bucks on the prediction that Cornelia's on the rebound within a week."

Taranee glared at Irma over the rims of her glasses. "Irma, your heart is as black as the dark side of the moon."

Irma shrugged and grinned. "Okay, ten bucks says that she dates _your _brother first."

Taranee's eyes bugged at that statement, but any possible attempt on her behalf to charbroil Irma was mercifully halted by the interruption of Uriah—quite possibly the only time she'd ever been glad to hear that sneering voice of his. "Hey, _Wilma!_" he shouted from across the courtyard, accompanied by the snickers of his lumbering cronies. "Since you ain't tuning Olsen's six-string anymore, how about you come over to my place and hit _my _whammy bar for awhile?"

"How about we give _you_ a Fender Stratocaster brand _enema_, you pockmarked asshat?" Irma yelled back through cupped hands, leaping up atop the planter as she did so. A gaggle of cheerleaders crossing the quad began giggling at her proclamation, prompting Uriah and his goons to scowl and beat a hasty retreat.

"All right, Irma, you've redeemed yourself for the moment," Taranee allowed her, fighting a small smile as she crumpled her paper bag into a ball. "I don't think Hay Lin or I would've been able to pull _that_ out of our arsenal."

Hay Lin nodded eagerly. "Especially 'asshat'."

"Eh, I say next time we lure him off school grounds with a blow-up doll on a string, then flash-freeze him," Irma declared, jumping back down to the concrete and plopping herself down beside Will, whose expression hadn't much changed. _Man, what is it going to take to get the girl to snap out of this funk of hers?_ "That way we won't get detention. And I'm sure there's _some_ beastie in Meridian who'd appreciate a human Popsicle for dessert. Whaddya say, Will?" She looped an arm around the sagging shoulders of her friend, who was now sitting doubled over with chin in hands.

"He kissed me," was Will's muffled response.

Irma froze, goggling at Will, or rather at the curtain of red hair that shielded her face from her friends. "Who? _Uriah?_"

"Caleb."

_Thank God._ She'd nearly had a heart attack—wait, _wait, _back it up a second! Had she said _Caleb?_ As in, the resident freedom-fighter dude who usually either had a smelly green passling or a snooty blonde Guardian clinging to him like a barnacle?

_Caleb…kissed Will? I understand the words, but that sentence makes no sense!_

She glanced back at Taranee and Hay Lin, whose mouths had both formed immobile Os. "Say that again, hon?" she prompted, withdrawing her arm so as to give Will space.

"It didn't mean anything," Will said in a strangely faraway voice, her face finally resurfacing, but avoiding her friends' stunned expressions at all costs. "He kissed me, but it didn't mean anything." She ambled to her feet. "I—I gotta go, you guys."

Irma, Taranee and Hay Lin shared another wordless glance after the furious pounding of Will's sneakers on the sidewalk had finally receded. "Do you think that was the _why_?" Hay Lin finally asked in a tentative voice.

Irma held up the backpack Will had left behind in her haste, tugging the frog zipper-pull enough to see the glowing Heart of Kandrakar secreted inside amongst a nest of gum wrappers. "Don't know, but if it's making her forget stuff like this, I'm sure it means _something._"

* * *

Will knew exactly where Cornelia was. While making a slapdash effort to finish her algebra homework that morning, she'd overheard some of the drama kids talking about an emergency lunch rehearsal. From what she'd been able to gather between equations, the guy slated to play Tommy in the school's production of _Brigadoon_ had been stricken with a sudden case of mono, forcing both his understudy and Cornelia, as the female lead, to re-rehearse all of their scenes. 

Backstage was mostly empty, except for a couple of art students painting a pastoral scene on a huge sheet of plywood, and another couple who had apparently designated the spot near the giant table saw as appropriate for making out. Will ignored the few giggles wafting over from that direction, not wanting to be reminded of all the equally inappropriate places she and Matt had once sought out for that same purpose. _Hope they don't get any farther than heavy necking, or one of them might end up losing a couple of fingers._

She peered around the heavy velvet curtain to see Cornelia standing with her back turned, facing a boy Will didn't recognize. "All right, we'll start over from the spoken part," the drama instructor announced. "Adam, your turn."

"You see?" Adam read aloud from his script. "We mustn't be sorry about anything."

"I'm not," Cornelia responded, and Will didn't miss her tone of voice. Despite her attempt at a Scottish brogue, it was a shade less 'heartbroken Highland lass' and a good deal more 'wounded-pride Cornelia Hale.' "In fact, I shouldna be surprised if I'll be less lonely now than I was afore ye came. After all, there's other fish in the Loch besides ye, right?"

Adam scratched his head, looking puzzled. The drama instructor threw down his script and heaved an enormous sigh. "Cornelia, _what_ are you doing?"

"Making a last-minute revision," Cornelia answered, turning to face him with her arms folded across her chest. "I've decided that Fiona just needs to get _over_ Tommy. I mean, I'm sure you can't turn around in Brigadoon without hitting some hot guy in a kilt, so why even _bother_ pining for some guy from another world who says he loves you, but isn't going to drop his other-world baggage to be with you?" Cornelia concluded this by holding her thumb and forefinger in an L-shape against her forehead. Will cringed.

"Because, _Miss Hale,_ although your creative input is greatly appreciated, we are doing this play as originally written by Lerner and Loewe," the drama instructor huffed, removing his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose in clear exasperation. "Furthermore, have you already forgotten that at the end Tommy _does _leave his life to be with Fiona?"

"Oh, _sure_, at first it'll be all roses and champagne—or whatever it is Scottish people drink—but what about when Tommy starts getting the itch to go on raids and fight Lurdens when he and Fiona are supposed to go out that night? What then? Is she supposed to sit at home and play the _bagpipes_ forever?" Cornelia's face had been getting progressively redder throughout this passionate outburst.

Will stared blankly at her fuming friend for a long moment. So did the drama instructor, before finding his voice again. "Cornelia, why don't you take ten minutes and go get something to drink. You too, Adam."

Adam gratefully took off in the opposite direction. Cornelia tossed her script to the stage and stomped toward the curtain, but slowed when she noticed Will hovering behind it.

"Oh. Will. What're you doing here?" Her voice sounded more tired than angry.

Will shrugged by way of a noncommittal response, offering Cornelia a hesitant smile. "Everyone was wondering where you were at lunch."

"Oh. Yeah," Cornelia said distractedly. "I guess I didn't tell anyone. I don't remember much about first period except Irma blabbing about some Greek guy who dated his sisters, and…ew. Anyway, you want to go get a soda?"

The two girls headed backstage, past the scenery-painters, past the couple making out near the heavy machinery ("Watch out for the jigsaw!" Cornelia called to them over her shoulder), and through the heavy double doors leading outside, where a soda machine stood against the building. Will ventured the question just as Cornelia popped the tab on her diet cola. "So…how are you?"

Cornelia made a face as she sipped, though it might have been due to the aspartame. "Couldn't you tell by my performance back there? I guess I'm doing about as well as you are."

Will began fiddling with the tab on her own can of ginger ale, pushing it back and forth until it finally snapped off. "Yeah. Um, Cornelia, there's…something I need to tell you."

"What, that Caleb was at your house last night? Duh, of course he was," Cornelia added when Will's expression took a turn towards shocked. "How _else_ was he going to get home? I didn't hear any police sirens going off, so he sure didn't manage to get back into my basement." She gave a little snort. "I guess he filled you in on all the details, huh?"

"Not really." Will's hand slid inside her right jacket pocket and closed around the pendant, a reflexive action she barely noticed. "He said…you deserved someone better." Well, it wasn't _exactly_ what he'd said, but that had seemed to be the gist of it.

"Funny, he said the same thing about you," Cornelia replied, watching a trail of ants march along a crack in the concrete. Fortunately she took no notice of the blush spreading across Will's cheeks. "Of course, that's when I all but flipped and practically accused him of having a thing with you. Which…was totally ridiculous of me," she added in a more apologetic voice. "I mean, like you'd _ever_ do anything like go behind my back with Caleb in a million years."

Will didn't realize how hard she'd been biting her lip until she tasted blood.

The two girls sat in silence for a couple of minutes, the vacant pause filled only by the sharp rustle of leaves overhead and the hissing carbonation in their drinks. Will continued rolling the pendant methodically between thumb and forefinger while trying to keep her breathing relaxed. _Don't say it. She doesn't need to hear it. You're not going to say _anything.

"Will?" Cornelia finally spoke up. "Can I…ask you something?"

"Uh—yeah. Of course." Will hoped she didn't look as alarmed as she sounded.

"How long was it before you…cried? Over Matt, I mean?"

"Uh…well…" Will hesitated, then looked down at her soda can for the answer. "Uh…a week, I guess. Why?"

"Because…I feel like I should be torn up over this," Cornelia said, drawing a deep breath. "I mean, we were together almost _three _years! Like, the average celebrity marriage doesn't even last that long. And Caleb was my first—well, my first _everything_, really. So, according to all the magazines, I'm supposed to be going through box after box of Kleenex and loading up on Haagen-Daas while spacing out in front of sad made-for-TV movies about girls with leukemia. But…right now I'm just _mad_, you know? Mad and frustrated and…is any of this making sense to you?"

It took Will's brain a moment to decipher the rambling missive issued from Cornelia's lips, but she finally nodded. "No, I get it. I'm the opposite, I guess. I haven't gotten mad yet. I've mostly just been kind of…confused." _A feeling which has multiplied tenfold since last night,_ she didn't add. "I felt like crying in the beginning, but I spent so much time trying _not _to that it just finally all came flooding out last night. God, I was actually sitting there in my pajamas going to pieces all in front of Caleb, and then all of a sudden he—" Oh. Oh. There went the hands over the mouth. She hadn't meant to do this _now. _

Cornelia finally stopped watching the ants and turned to face Will, morbid curiosity slowly manifesting itself across her fine features. "All of a sudden he…_what, _Will?"

Will mumbled something that sounded like "hixtmeep" against her palms.

"_What?"_

Terra-cotta eyes squinched up tight to block out wintry blue ones. "He kissed me."

It was a few moments before realization finally hit and the blonde's face took on the same ripened-tomato look it had had onstage.

"What." Not a question this time, but rather a forceful one-syllable statement uttered in a low, level voice. Will thought she would have preferred Cornelia screaming and brandishing a giant rubber mallet, to speaking in _that_ tone.

"It—it wasn't anything—it was just—it was just that I was completely losing it and he was—he was just trying to—it was nothing," Will heard an incoherent string of something-or-other escape from her mouth. What was wrong with her? All she could think about was how she was trying _not _to think about how she'd wanted to more or less jump Caleb afterward. Not exactly the marking of a sympathetic friend. Or a _good_ friend.

Cornelia turned the soda can around in her hands, examining the list of ingredients. She said nothing. Will felt pressure mounting in her chest, her lungs like a pair of balloons being squeezed.

"Cornelia, I'm sor—"

"I think you better go," Cornelia said quietly, still not moving to look at Will.

So for the second time that day, Will left something behind as she bolted down the sidewalk, this time a can of half-consumed ginger ale and a fellow Guardian who ducked behind her cascade of blonde hair, hid her face in her hands and started to cry.

* * *

A/N: Dramarama, I know. But hey, I think I can say with certainty that this is the only WITCH fic to make reference to Dr. Strangelove, Lerner and Loewe, _and_ The Simpsons (twice!) all within the space of one chapter. And they say all WxC fics are alike...

I know Irma's sense of humor is a little more gallows than usual here, but hey, she's had three years to get a bit twisted.

Also, I will be making up for the distinct lack of Caleb in this chapter in very short order. Around the same time I start making up for the distinct lack of actual plot progression. :)

Once again, thanks for the reviews. You guys rock!


	5. Funny Little Frog

**Beautiful Collision  
**"Funny Little Frog"

* * *

Two hulking guards clutching seven-foot-long lances nodded amiably to Cornelia in greeting, as the dank stone floor of her basement gave way to the immaculate ivory marble of the Meridian palace. "Evening, Lady Cornelia," rumbled one in a gravelly baritone. "The Queen is upstairs in her private study. Allow me to summon an escort to accompany you there." 

"Oh, that's okay." Cornelia waved a French-manicured hand in dismissal. "I'm not really expecting a sneak attack from the third floor solarium—but thanks for the offer."

The guards merely nodded again and resumed their attentive stances flanking either side of the portal, leaving Cornelia to continue on her way, swinging a bulging paper shopping bag from one hand. She'd never really considered the oddity of being welcomed by enormous humanoids brandishing sharply pointed ears and teeth and gouging implements, when she stepped across the threshold into her best friend's home. It was simply something one got used to, when one's best friend happened to be ruler of a parallel world. And frankly, it was a trifle less annoying than the way Will's mom was always barging in with glasses of Tang.

_Oh…Will._ Cornelia heaved an impatient sigh. She really hadn't wanted to dwell upon thoughts of Will, not tonight. Not Will and not Caleb and _definitely_ not about the two of them engaged in a passionate tongue-tango. But Elyon didn't know about the breakup yet, which meant that she'd spend at least an hour recounting all that had happened, and another alternately cursing like a sailor and sobbing like an infant. At least she'd come with the necessary equipment.

She passed the aforementioned solarium—really a lunarium now that it was nighttime—en route to Elyon's study, wondering what kind of official queenly business could be occupying her at this hour. Upon reaching the door, her knuckles hovered uncertainly over its surface, but her hesitance was interrupted by the sound of her friend's voice from within.

"Come on in, Cornelia. I'm almost done."

Cornelia peered around the door jamb. "How'd you know it was me?"

"Uh…magic powers, remember?" The flaxen-haired Light of Meridian shrugged, a slight grin creasing her features as she scrawled across a piece of parchment. She was seated behind a large gilded desk, her diminutive form nearly concealed by piles of papers, sticks of sealing-wax and partially unrolled maps that looked like they might fall apart if nudged. "That and the guards have far less dainty footsteps than you do. Go ahead and sit down." She gestured to a wingback chair nearby, still not looking up from whatever it was she was jotting down.

"Yes, your Highnessness," Cornelia responded dryly as she plopped into the pale lavender velvet cushions, dropping the bag at her feet. "What's with all the paperwork? It's not like you're punished with nightly geometry anymore."

"No, I've got to pick territorial governors from a group of over five hundred applicants," Elyon replied crisply, dunking her white peacock-feather quill into an inkwell. "Which means I've got over five hundred letters addressed to 'O Most Exalted Sovereign Light of Meridian' to slog through. Believe me, I'd _rather _be doing geometry. And next time I come visit you, remind me to pick up some _normal_ pens at the office supply place. This stupid quill keeps drying on me and I can't stop sticking it in my mouth."

Cornelia suppressed a tiny snicker as she peered at Elyon's black-stained lips. "Good, 'cause I was about to lecture you for taking up the mall goth look. Don't you have…_underlings_ that do that kind of thing for you?"

"Subordinates," corrected Elyon, attempting to rub her mouth with the back of her hand and only succeeding in smearing ink across her cheek. " 'Underlings' sounds like some kind of weed you'd step on…the kind of thing Phobos would have called them." An unmistakable edge crept into her voice at the less-than-rosy memory of her older brother. "And the laundry's one thing, but I'd rather oversee this sort of matter myself. I don't really trust policy-making left up to other people. You know. They could be doing what _he_ did."

"What, playing you like a fiddle?" Cornelia answered automatically before clapping a hand over her mouth. "Uh…I mean…"

"It's okay, Cornelia. It's the truth, after all, isn't it? That's why I'm taking care now to not let anyone pluck my strings. I have advisors, sure, but I'm the one who has the final say on everything." Elyon finally dropped her quill back into the inkwell and rubbed her mouth again, making a face. "And I say I think I've had enough for tonight." She lifted an eyebrow at Cornelia's parcel on the floor. "What's in the bag?"

Holding the bag aloft, Cornelia began unloading the contents upon Elyon's desk. "Well, I've got two pints of Haagen-Daas, one Bananas Foster and one butter pecan, both of which are rapidly melting. One economy-sized box of tissues with those little polka dots that kill bacteria…and last but not least, a copy of the Vance Michael Justin opus _Ocean of Tears,_ the very last film of his celebrated poet-shirt phase. Oh, and spoons." She held up one in each hand.

Elyon blinked, then took a closer look at the DVD case. "Isn't this the one where the girlfriend gets cancer and they decide to elope? And you were gnashing your teeth the first time we saw it because you thought the actress playing the girlfriend looked like Courtney Grumper and she wasn't worthy?"

"Uh…if memory serves," Cornelia said, shrugging with an air of feigned innocence.

Elyon nodded thoughtfully, then took on a suspicious look all of a sudden. "Wait a second. Ice cream, Kleenex, and Leukemia Theater? Cornelia, did you break up with Caleb?"

Cornelia sagged. "That obvious, huh?" she answered quietly.

Elyon pointed toward the chair again, expression sympathetic, but her eyes bearing a ravenous sort of curiosity. "Sit down and take the Kleenex with you. I want to hear _everything._"

So Cornelia obeyed the royal edict, beginning with her and Caleb's aborted last evening together and leaving out no uncertain detail—strange necklaces, 'obligations' and all. By the time she got to Will's sordid admission at yesterday's lunch, Elyon's eyes were wide as saucers, a spoonful of runny butter pecan paused halfway to her open mouth. "_What?_ Will and Caleb? Making out?"

"Well…" Cornelia wheedled, trying to recall Will's exact words. "She didn't…exactly say that. She said he kissed her."

"But _how?_ French or sans tongues? Friendly peck on the cheek? CPR? There's a lot of things that constitute a kiss, you know. I need details."

Cornelia felt mildly rankled at Elyon's apparent enthusiasm over the subject, then patiently reminded herself that after all, Meridian shopkeepers did not carry _Star Tracks_ or _Celeb-Blab Weekly_, and the young queen's only real source of gossip were the staff rumblings from the kitchens. And while on occasion, one might overhear from the housekeepers an entertainingly lurid topic like a hundred and one uses for dual-horned skribben testicles, usually it was about mundane (or gross) things like which guard was caught using the palace planters as chamber pots. A matter which earned her Cornelia's sincerest sympathies. "Well, she didn't really say that either," the Earth Guardian was forced to admit, twining a blonde tendril around one finger. "She just said that…she'd been crying over Matt in front of him…and that it was nothing."

"So…maybe it was." Elyon inclined her head as she scraped her spoon across the bottom of the container.

"But…but…" The outrage and misery that Cornelia had been stewing in these last few days—which she had, as of yesterday, directed at the Keeper of the Heart—reduced from a steady boil to a feeble simmer. Maybe that _was_ all it had been. Caleb trying to comfort an upset Will. Friends did that sort of thing for each other all the time—so what if they happened to be seeing other people?

Except the both of them had, technically, been on the rebound at the time. And Will's initial reluctance to admit it had even happened was kind of strange—as was when she'd finally spit it out, clapping her hands to her mouth as though she'd expelled a state secret. And then there was still that _pendant…_ The boiling resumed as Cornelia shook her head. No, she wasn't willing to forgive either of them yet. Her wounded feelings were still a long way from scabbing over.

A sharp knock on the door cut into Cornelia's thoughts. "Come in, Aldarn," Elyon called around her spoon.

The green-skinned ex-rebel strode in, dressed in the immaculate uniform and cape of Meridian's Captain of the Guard—a position offered him when his best friend Caleb had refused it. He stopped short as his eyes settled on Cornelia, looking maybe just a touch flustered at the sight of the young woman he'd once attempted to chat up with fakey-ollies—but quickly regained his confident composure and bowed deeply to both her and Elyon. "A thousand pardons, Lady Cornelia, Your Majesty—but there's been another disappearance to the north, and I thought you might want to be notified as soon as possible."

Elyon stood up suddenly, her spoon clattering to the desk. "Not Crystalgard," she said in a low voice that Cornelia hadn't heard before—a voice tinged with dark, ominous notes of concern.

Aldarn inclined his head in confirmation. "Young girl, aged seven, wandered away from her family's wagon. Parents are cloth traders en route to a bazaar in the north—they stopped the wagon about a quarter-mile south of the town in midafternoon to take a nap. When they woke, she'd disappeared. Of course," he added in a somewhat unconvinced tone, "it's also possible that she could have been carried off by an animal—but given the circumstances…"

Elyon bobbed her head rapidly. "No, no, you're right. I just…" the young monarch pressed a hand to her brow in frustration. "We've sent soldiers to inspect three different times, and every time they find nothing! Usually not even a footprint! And I just…I have a feeling that this time won't be any different, and yet…" She sighed, closing her eyes. "Only seven years old…"

"Wait, wait, wait a second," Cornelia interrupted, rising from the chair and waving a hand at the other two in mock-kindergarten fashion. "Um, Official Guardian of the Veil here. Is something going on that I should know about? What is this Crystalgard place?"

"It's a town—well, it _used_ to be," Elyon corrected herself. "A long time ago, before Phobos came to power, it was home to a colony of artisans. Glass artisans, mostly, which was where the name came from. They designed the most awesome buildings—and plants and flowers and trees that were all made from colored blown glass—there's a book in the library full of drawings of them. Now it's all just ruins, with shattered glass everywhere you walk." These last few bitter syllables made it evident that Elyon clearly thought her brother had had something to do with _that_ as well.

"It's fairly remote, so few people bother heading near it," Aldarn added. "But travelers passing through to one of the other northern villages have been known to pick over the ruins. And occasionally, one of them will just…disappear. There's no rhyme or reason to it at all."

Cornelia mulled this over. "You're thinking something lives there? Some kind of…body snatcher?" she speculated.

"If there is, _we've_ never found hide nor hair of it," Aldarn said, shaking his head in baffled exasperation. "I was with the outfit that investigated the last disappearance—a man in his mid-twenties, a thief by all accounts, who'd bragged to some of his tavern buddies that he was going to bring back something valuable. We inspected the remains of every building, combed through pile upon pile of glass shards—nothing. You'd never know anyone had been through."

"Maybe it's something you can't see," Cornelia wondered aloud, thinking back to that overgrown warthog with invisible tendencies that had terrorized the halls of Sheffield until the Guardians stepped in.

"If it is—and if it's something involving magic—I ought to be investigating, myself," Elyon sighed again as she adjusted the gold circlet proclaiming her status, which twinkled merrily even in the room'sdim light. "If there's some sort of invisible stronghold full of Phobos sympathizers hanging around, we're going to need a lot more than just a couple of royal guards on call."

"Which is why you have _me,_" Cornelia pointed out, stepping closer to wind an arm around her best friend's shoulders. "And the other Guardians. Why don't you let us check it out first, and if we end up in over our heads, we'll call on your awesome royal powers to finish the job, O Exalted One?"

"Quit that!" Elyon giggled, though the seriousness hadn't fled her features entirely. "All right. I'll leave it to you guys. But are you sure that isn't going to be a problem? I mean, you and Will working in tandem so soon after the…you know?" Her eyes flickered to Aldarn, whose own face held obvious interest, but was clearly not about to beseech the matter.

"Oh. Right." Cornelia hadn't thought about that. Giving Will the chance to lord her Supreme Guardianship over her just two days after she'd had the gall to suck face with Cornelia's boyfriend—okay, technically, _ex-_boyfriend—sounded about as much fun as rolling naked in a pile of manure, or getting a hot-oil massage from Blunk. That was to say, _not._

But there were more important things to worry about now, like a pair of distraught parents missing their little girl. This was business—the business of Saving the World—and Cornelia was determined to be the bigger person, regardless of how petty her feelings toward Will might have been at the moment. And besides that, Elyon was counting on her.

She pulled on a bright, phony toothpaste-commercial smile and nodded reassuringly at the Queen of Meridian. "No biggie. I'm a professional, remember?"

* * *

The previous morning, Caleb had awoken in the dark, thrown together his meager belongings, tacked a sheet of vellum with a scrawled thank-you to Sario for his hospitality to the silo door, and set off on foot to the north. Somewhere around noon he'd lucked into catching up with a traders' caravan headed in the same direction, who'd been more than willing to let him stow away in one of the wagons once they noticed he was the great Caleb, resistance leader and modern folk-hero—a pronouncement which, much to Caleb's own surprise, had made him blush. The Caleb of three years ago would have been loudly proclaiming himself as such, he had thought wryly, but then again he hadn't yet been humbled by a certain quintet of formidable little girls. 

That night had been spent partaking of the traders' hospitality, sharing stew and swapping old war stories around the bonfire when they'd stopped to camp for the night, then falling asleep underneath the stars to the lonesome serenade of a pan flute. In the morning he'd continued on with them as far as the creek at Heartsfall, when the caravan diverged east. Which was where he happened to be now, lying sprawled on the creek bank among tiny violet flowers and humming insects, staring up at the clouds which thickened as they sailed on brisk winds across the sky to the north.

Throughout all of this, he'd been trying not to think of Will.

And for the most part, he'd failed. Miserably.

Oh, he'd damn well made an effort. He'd tried to lose himself in the rapt attentions of a few of the merchants' daughters the night before, who'd hung on his every word—and, in the case of a particularly bold girl in a blue kerchief, hung on his arm as well—as he'd trotted out the heroic tale of his rescue of the Threbian lord's daughter for the dozenth or so time. But as he'd gotten to listing his extensive catalog of battle scars, he'd made the mistake of looking into one girl's eyes—warm reddish-brown eyes—and suddenly he wasn't looking at a stranger's adoring face at all, but rather a familiar redhead with a sarcastic lopsided grin, arms folded in a silent proclamation that he was going to have to try a lot harder if he wanted to impress her.

Caleb groaned. _Like what? Start a band and take up the electric lute? Would _that _impress her? _

It was all moot anyway. He had no business even thinking such a thing, not when Will was still all heartsick over Matt—and when he himself was only three days severed from Cornelia. It was for the best that he'd decided to simply stay away from Earth—and _all_ of the Guardians—for now while he got his head together and got back to business. Girls were just an unnecessary distraction. A never-ending source of anxiety and grief that kept him from his _true _purpose.

So what if they'd been invaluable allies in the war; it was peacetime now and he had no need for their powers. So what if they'd become his closest friends; he had other friends _here_, on his native side of the Veil, not to mention legions of admirers—most of them female. So what if he'd fallen in love with one of them three years ago; he had nothing to show for it now but a bruised ego and an extremely agitated ex-girlfriend who might cause a literal earthquake if she were mad enough. At least he was safely out of range.

And so what if he'd kissed the Keeper of the Heart. It had been just a kiss on the forehead, nothing more. A very brotherly gesture. Except he hadn't felt the least bit brotherly while he was about it. Not with his nerves crackling electric, turning to live wires and his blood to molten lava as his arms enfolded her lithe body…as one hand had stroked the soft garnet hair while the other rested on her back, keenly aware of the trembling flesh under the thin cotton of her top…_Oh, gods. _His blood pounded furiously at the all-too-vivid memory.

"Why did I have to _kiss her_?" he roared at himself in frustration, but got no response other than the bubbling of the creek and a few scattered ribbits from frogs hopping amongst the rushes.

Caleb rolled over on his stomach, propping himself up on his elbows as he watched the small spotted amphibians—perhaps the most pervasive reminder of Will yet—tread the shallow water. "Frogs. Figures," he grumbled. "Even nature's against me."

This just wouldn't do. He couldn't go on constantly losing himself in thoughts of Will, his pulse racing at the memory of what it had felt like to touch her, not when he wasn't sure he could ever look her in the eye again after that damned cheeky attempt at comforting her. The way she'd wrenched away from him—well, sure, he'd been surprised by the kiss himself, but she'd acted as though he were contagious.

He'd only made things worse. Will wanted Matt, not him, and he should've been trying to encourage her to that end, instead of talking smack about the guy—whether he deserved it or not (and Caleb was firmly convinced that he did). And Will deserved to get what she wanted, even if it _was_ that…straggly-headed, string-plucking _skainsmate._ (Whose string-plucking skills were, frankly, nothing Caleb couldn't replicate on a handcrafted Metamoorian bandora with an ounce more style to boot.)

_But she deserves _better _than him!_ flared his indignant thoughts again. _She deserves…_

"CALEB!"

Caleb's eyes shot wide open at the gleefully gutteral exclamation of his name that pierced the sleepy creek air. Not exactly the voice he'd been hoping for…but it had been a long time since he'd last heard it nonetheless, and he couldn't help but expel a tiny sigh of relief.

"Blunk," he responded, turning himself upright once more to face the bug-eyed creature's unabashedly cheerful face. Even though the pilfering green passling had proclaimed himself Caleb's eternal bosom buddy back during their days tangling with Phobos, he had thankfully opted not to accompany the rebel on his restoration tour of Meridian. Swiping and swindling were, after all, a bit counterproductive to charity work. He seemed much the same as when Caleb had last seen him: same snaggle-toothed grin; same stained burlap bag of no doubt ill-gotten goods in his grip; though the odor seemed to have improved… "Long time no…" Oh. There it was. "…smell."

"What Caleb doing out here?" Blunk inquired, dragging his heavy wares behind him as leafhoppers scattered in his wake, oblivious to the fact that his human friend's expression indicated a sudden and intense battle with his gag reflex. "Why not with girls?"

Caleb scowled before he could stop himself. "Caleb needs to get away from girls for awhile, that's why. What are _you_ doing all the way out here? Pickings must be pretty slim."

"On contrary!" crowed Blunk, his uneven yellow grin spreading from ear to ear as he held the mouth of the bag open for Caleb to peer inside. "Look at all Blunk sparklies! Many sharp edges, so double as stabbing weapon. And, since Caleb Blunk favorite person, Caleb get ten percent off!"

Caleb raised a suspicious eyebrow as he studied the bag's contents. A cracked hand mirror with a beautifully sculpted pewter frame glinted dully up at him among a colorful riot of smashed blown glass. There were all sorts of shapes and objects, all rendered painstakingly in transparent glass: a broken amber-colored branch with a still-intact rosebud and leaf; a replica of a human hand shot through with electric blue to represent veins; a tiny green frog the size of his thumb, eyes two miniscule flecks of black. He held the frog aloft in his palm, wondering to himself whose idea of a practical joke this was. "Where did you find these, Blunk?"

"In town that way." Blunk stabbed a finger in the general northernmost direction. "Nobody there. Long gone. Left sparklies lying on ground, all smashy-smashy. So Blunk help himself."

"What?" Caleb's brow furrowed. He'd heard plenty in his lifetime about the abandoned settlements to the north. During Phobos's reign, his troops had taken particular enjoyment in cutting off the trade routes and ransacking caravans for their own selfish gain, forcing an exodus of the townspeople when the grain that was supposed to sustain them throughout the harsh winters never arrived. Every now and then you'd come across human bones half-buried on the trails, each a solemn marker of someone who hadn't been strong enough to make the journey to a more fruitful village. He remembered, as a young boy, watching his father rebury a pile of unusually small bones, not realizing at the time they belonged to a child likely not much older than himself. The memory infused him with simultaneous swellings of sorrow and rage.

But in all the stories he'd heard, there'd only been one mention of a "glass village." The one his mother had talked about whenever she gestured proudly to the ornate looking-glass that hung over the bureau. The one Phobos's soldiers had smashed to pieces the night they'd come to burn the house of the rebel traitor Julian. The last tangible thing they'd had left of her.

Caleb swallowed, hoping his emotion wasn't visible on his face. He cleared his throat and tried out a nonchalant tone. "Blunk, you think you could show me where this place is?"

As usual, Blunk took no notice of Caleb's mood, too absorbed in his own mercantile machinations as he scratched his warty chin, pondering. "All right," he said at last. "Blunk show Caleb, but Caleb not tell anybody. Blunk want market cornered. And if Caleb want frog, Caleb pay for it. Blunk not eat off five-finger discount."

Caleb opened his clenched fist, having forgotten all about the tiny glass frog pressed into his palm, now glittering up at him as a stray ray of sunlight poked through the clouds. Why the hell not, he thought. Maybe it'd bring him luck.

* * *

A/N: I live! And I apologize profusely for my absence. Things have been semi-nuts since the move, coupled with the fact that I've apparently lost my will to write (which I'm sure is proportionate to the fact that I lost Toon Disney when I switched cable providers, gack, so no more reruns for me). 

This chapter's not as long as I originally wanted (they never are), but next time expect a chap with Caleb, more Caleb and basically nothing but Caleb. (Okay, a little Blunk. Not much, I promise.) I'm afraid his reunion with Will is still a ways off…and that's all I'm gonna say about that. (is evil)

Crystalgard is based off a town of the same name in the ancient PC game LOOM (which you might've noticed I have a forum dedicated to). Aside from the name, the only real similarities are the purpose of the town (glassmakers' colony) and the fact that it went smashy-smash. That's it. (LOOM's Crystalgard, in fact, looks like it was constructed from Coke bottles and is manned by guys in spandex who somewhat resemble Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama. I can safely say mine will NOT be like anything of the sort.)

Chap title is a great song by Belle and Sebastian…and "skainsmate" is an Elizabethan euphemism for "prostitute." Moo ha ha. (I'm a dork.)

Once again, thanks for your reviews, you guys are really the best inspiration.


	6. Parting Glass

A/N: Well, it took three years and a continent change, but I'm back. Bear in mind I have NOT watched the second season and I probably won't ever at this rate; I'm more interested in my version of events, where Caleb's mom WASN'T revealed to be a major second-arc villain (dude, _what._)

* * *

**Beautiful Collision**  
"Parting Glass"

* * *

He stood at the end of a shallow valley, the town laid out neatly before him, a glittering sea of transparency lit by the brilliant flame-tinted glow of approaching sunset. Two columns stood sentry at the entrance proper to the village, studded with enormous hollow crystals of clear and opaque blue glass, like fanciful twin towers made of rock candy—that remarkably, seemed untouched by the destruction that blighted the town beyond it.

There were buildings. Gleaming towers with punctured panels and gaping holes in their sides, jagged and crumbling spires, the sparse metal framework underneath bare, sagging, exposed to the elements. Solariums and pavilions with cracked domes and caving-in roofs, the northern wind whistling softly through the yawning fractures in their front doors, closed steadfastly to the surrounding environment. If one looked long and close enough, through the inner strata of protective glass layered like an onion, one could barely make out the few scant remnants of lives no longer lived here. A brocade shawl hanging from the back of a chair; a child's abandoned game of marbles in the middle of a floor, still waiting for some adult to trip on them.

Caleb found himself at an utter loss for words as he tried to take it all in. This was not the first such abandoned settlement he'd encountered, but it was easily the most remarkable. If it were this awe-inspiring in its current state of decay, he could only imagine what a sight it might have been at the peak of its grandeur.

It was also, quite simply, the creepiest such town he had ever seen. The silent towns of Meridian—that was, the ones who had been afforded the dignity to remain standing, instead of being razed and burnt to the ground by Phobos's army—always had a certain otherworldly air to them, as if the souls who had since evacuated had never _quite _left. But there was something different about the glass village…a presence here that one didn't feel in the coarser farming or smithing towns. Some sort of foreign energy, that made the skin prickle, the spine tingle, that set the senses on edge. Something he recognized, from being in the presence of…

_Magic?_

Caleb stood motionless between the blue crystal columns, the breeze whipping his hair back into his eyes as he stared down the dirt road that led into the heart of the village, paved with the shards of what had no doubt once been carefully sculpted foliage, as the broken glass tree trunks lining the route attested. _Then it's just like Mom said…they grind a little magic in with the sand. _He smiled slightly at the memory, willfully ignoring the pang of a dull ache that accompanied it. _Huh, and I thought that was just a dumb story to keep me quiet and out of trouble, like the one about the Bogeyman of Buttermarsh who shaved kids' heads in the middle of the night. _

He was startled out of his reverie by a sudden insistent tugging on his pant leg. "What Caleb looking for here?" Blunk questioned, craning his nonexistent neck to peer up at his rebel friend. "Remember, Blunk claim monopoly on sparkly market. No resale." He jabbed at Caleb's pocket, where he'd tucked away the tiny frog earlier.

"Don't worry, Blunk," Caleb said, rolling his eyes, though the half-smile remained. "I'm not going into the souvenir business. I'm more interested in…mirrors."

"Mirror? Blunk have mirror right here. Nice price," the passling insisted as he pulled the pewter hand-mirror from his bag, waving it as he scrambled after Caleb, now striding purposefully toward the town. "Ten—no, _fifteen _percent off! Special bargain, rebel leader only! No fake discount!"

"I was thinking more along the lines of a _big _mirror," Caleb said vaguely, though a very specific image dwelled in his mind. A looking-glass set in bronze, longer than his six-year-old self was tall, a coquettish siren perched at the top of the frame amidst sculpted rolling waves. After his mother's death, he'd found himself staring into it more and more, hoping against common sense that the magic she so fervently believed it contained might somehow bring her back, or at least give him one more glimpse of her warm green eyes, the skin around them crinkling like tissue paper as she laughed.

It hadn't. It had done nothing but dutifully reflect his own sullen face back at him until the night it was destroyed, the glimmering fragments left to the flames—and in the midst of the chaos that followed, the memory of it had been purged from Caleb's mind. Whatever greater purpose it might have served was a buried secret now, known only to the one who had forged it.

Were there still other such pieces of glass here, left whole and untouched by the ravages of time or the blunt force of a Lurden's mace, that might still hold some arcane power?

Finding them would change nothing, he knew. They wouldn't bring Crystalgard back. They wouldn't bring his mother back. But his burning curiosity was almost as unbearable as that alien sensation that caused the gooseflesh to raise on the back of his neck. He needed to know, not for some sense of absolution or finality for a decaying village that Meridian had long ago turned its back on, but for himself. A selfish motivator, perhaps. But it wasn't as though he had any other more pressing commitments at the moment.

His hand closed over the green-glass amphibian in his pocket. _I wonder what secrets you're hiding?_

"Blunk," he called over his shoulder to the passling. "I'm going to have a look around. Don't wait up."

Blunk, who was busy cleaning up the remnants of a crumbling garden of glass orchids, didn't bother to look up from his handiwork, only acknowledging the last words he heard from Caleb with a wave.

* * *

The largest building in Crystalgard happened to be the one at the very edge of the village, at the furthest distance from the rock-candy columns that marked the entrance. It was wholly opaque, the glass black as darkest obsidian with a corkscrew spire at the top that resembled some kind of crustacean's shell. Caleb observed it silently from a distance. He was assuredly no expert on supernatural energies, but this place crackled with a presence much different than the one that permeated the rest of the town. One that bordered on sinister.

He took a cautious step, then another, towards the thick black-glass slabs that made up the doorway, but halted in surprise once he'd gotten close enough to see the crude lettering chiseled into its surface. _STAY AWAY_. There was some sort of crusty substance smeared over the last word.

He scratched at the tail of the Y with a fingernail. The substance flaked off into brownish-red bits as he rubbed his fingertips together. _Blood? What the…_

Caleb backed up. He wasn't altogether sure he wanted to see what dark secrets lingered within the walls of this tower, especially not when he was unarmed and undefended by the Guardians. He turned to leave—then nearly tripped over something lying in the scrubby grass nearby.

It was a large, heavy disk of pewter, comparable in size to the manhole covers that studded the streets back on Earth. There was an intricate relief pattern around its circumference of symbols depicting the different phases of the moon. In the middle was a raised depiction of a woman asleep on a dais, flowing hair trailing down her back as the sun rose in the sky behind her. Caleb bent over to lift the thing, his brow furrowing as his fingers curled under the edges and touched something…smooth.

_A mirror!_ He held it at arm's length, regarding his reflection. The glass was slightly cloudy, but there were no rust spots or cracks marring the surface. The frame was patterned on this side, too…no, wait. Those were letters, not symbols. He squinted at the worn-smooth words around the edge. "The day shall never break, nor the dreamer ever wake," he mumbled as he turned the mirror slightly.

Suddenly, a high-pitched humming noise split the still air. Blinding electric-pink light spilled forth from the edges of the glass. Caleb nearly dropped the mirror in his astonishment. He gaped, openmouthed, as the glass suddenly turned fluid and rippled. He steadied the mirror, heaving it up into the crook of one arm, then tentatively reached toward it with his free hand.

His fingertips brushed the cool, mercury-like surface…and disappeared.

Before it could occur to Caleb that this was wholly _not _normal and perhaps somewhere he ought not to be sticking his fingers, his hand vanished up to the wrist, and then the elbow. Alarmed, he tried to pull it out—and found he couldn't. The mirror was trying to swallow him. His heartbeat kicked furiously into overdrive as he struggled with the pewter frame, throwing it to the ground and diving along with it. His other elbow hit the surface and skidded before that arm plunged through, too. He could feel nothing at all in his arms—or where his arms had been.

"Help…_help!_" he tried to scream, but it came out as more of a wheeze.

This was it. Caleb, legendary rebel and Meridian folk hero, was about to be eaten alive by a mirror, and there was no one around to help. No Blunk. No Guardians. No Will.

"Will," he gasped, his mind awash with flashes of red, before his head went under.

And then he tumbled. Weightless. Into the abyss, into nothingness.

Into bushes.

"_Ow!"_

He rubbed indignantly at a now sore spot on his arm as he uprighted himself and looked around—and found that to be of little use, since it was almost pitch-black. It had been early afternoon in Meridian, the sun blazing high overhead—so where was he now? Had he lost time going through the mirror? Ended up on the other side of the world?

All questions that prickled irritably in his mind, but were second to the most pressing matter of _getting out of here, wherever here is. _Reasoning that the mirror had been one half of a portal, he figured there must be a conjoining half around here somewhere that would lead him back to Crystalgard. He fumbled around in the scratchy undergrowth, but after twenty minutes of overturning nothing but twigs and rocks, it appeared that this would be somewhat more challenging than finding another mirror lying on the ground.

Caleb's eyes had adjusted slightly to the darkness by then, and he was able to make out a ragged path beyond the bushes, a path that led…towards light? He squinted. There was a faint glow in the distance, almost too faint for the naked eye, like the aura around a dying ember.

He proceeded on foot with caution, his navigation skills hindered by the fact that the winding footpath was only about half a shade lighter than the foliage around it, occasionally slowing up his progress in the form of a gnarled root or tree branch and provoking a muttered curse each time. With every step he gained closer to the source of the light. He'd suspected it was fire—torches lighting the outside of a dwelling. What he saw made him halt in his tracks.

It was fire of a sort, but not the organic kind produced with flint and tinder. They were ghostlights—glowing orbs, sentient entities, that hovered a few feet off the ground in ranks three deep. Floating sentries that guarded the diminutive stone fortress just beyond. Caleb was baffled. Everything about this whole scenario was deeply _off_—this starless, impenetrable blackness, this castle in the middle of nowhere, surrounded only by orbs of wizard's fire. Reachable only by a bespelled mirror. His mind sputtered possible explanations by the second, most of which he didn't wish to entertain. He wished for the Guardians, instead.

"Will," he said to the girl who wasn't there. "You have no idea how much I need you right now."

He hadn't realized he'd said it aloud until the orbs flickered, twitched—and in a dizzying blur of heat and sparks, rushed toward him, encircling him in a blazing barricade. He nearly toppled over backwards in surprise. So they really were sentries. He thought he'd dealt with all manner of perilous petrolmen before, but he'd never tried to reason with ghostlights before. Still, first time for everything, right?

"Look," he said, eyes darting from orb to orb as they rotated around him. "I'm not trying to break in. Believe me, I have no interest in hanging around here. I'm just looking for someone who can help."

He heard the groan of heavy wood against stone and blinked, trying to clear the incendiary haze from his eyes in order to focus. The door to the fortress slowly opened, and he could make out a silhouette in the doorway. The shape raised one arm, and the fireballs scattered, returning in a fiery flash to their previous positions. Caleb rubbed his eyes and squinted harder at the figure. A woman.

"That's enough," she said. "That's no way to treat our guest."

The paleness of her skin contrasted sharply with the dark velvet of her dress—a contrast made all the more odd by the fact that the collar appeared to extend all the way up the lower half of her face, concealing her mouth and most of her nose. Dark hair coiled tightly on either side of her head. Dark eyes, glittering like hard obsidian set into marble. There was nothing trustworthy there—but at the same time, Caleb had no one else to turn to.

_Just stay on your guard._

"I'm Lady Dalle," the woman said. "Do come inside. I've been expecting you."

He didn't have to bother asking what she meant by that, because it became apparent shortly after he stepped into the gleaming, torch-lit foyer. The long hallway that yawned before him was lined with tall mirrors in gilded frames. At first glance, the glass was a curious shade of black, as if it had been smeared with soot, but as he stepped closer to one he saw a slight twitch and realized it was a tree branch, waving in the wind. The mirrors provided a view of the path he'd taken to get here. They were similar, he thought, to the Earth inventions called surveillance cameras, which he'd learned were unfortunately everywhere the one time he and Cornelia had gotten, er, _carried away _in a department store changing room, only to interrupted by a brusque knock and a bark of "Get a room, you kids!"

He turned away from the glass to find Lady Dalle watching him with an air of amusement in her onyx eyes. "I so seldom receive visitors anymore. This just gives me a little advance notice." Her voice was curiously unmuffled by the swath of aubergine velvet that covered her mouth. It was smooth and mellifluous, the perfect voice for bedtime stories. It reminded him, vaguely, of his mother's.

There were a million things he wanted to ask, but for some reason he blurted out the most obvious question of all.

"You're from Crystalgard, aren't you?"

Lady Dalle's eyes darkened for a moment. "Yes," she said quietly. "That was my home, where I learned my trade. I left before it was destroyed."

Caleb turned from her to the seemingly endless corridor of looking-glasses and back again. "You forged all these mirrors yourself?"

"I did." Her eyes crinkled at the corners, and again, Caleb thought involuntarily of his mother. It was so strange how one's eyes seemed so much more expressive when you couldn't see the shape their mouth was taking. "I was an apprentice to the mirror master, Bevelious, since childhood. Most people—those who don't know the complexities of glass—never look at a mirror for what it is. They only look to see themselves. He was the one who taught me that mirrors can have so much more purpose than a receptacle for one's vanity. Depending on what the maker has in mind, each one can have its own distinct identity."

"Grinding magic in with the sand," he almost whispered to himself.

"So you've heard that old adage?" Lady Dalle laughed, high and tinkling as crystal, and for some reason it was enough for Caleb to momentarily forget that he didn't trust her.

"My mother—she had a mirror from Crystalgard, when I was a child. A bronze frame, with a siren at the top. She's the one who said that to me. I'd look and look, and I'd never see anything out of the ordinary. I don't know if she really knew what it did, or if she was teasing me, but then it was too late to—" Caleb cut himself off. What on earth had provoked that? He hadn't talked about his mother to anyone, not even Cornelia. He'd kept her memory so closely guarded all these years, like some precious jewel never taken off his person or shown to another soul, and here it was on display to a strange woma—no, a _witch _in a castle in the middle of who knows where, all because the corners of her eyes had crinkled just so.

He had the uncomfortable feeling she could somehow follow his thoughts, but if she did possess such a power, she was careful not to let on.

"A bronze siren," Lady Dalle mused. "Well, I don't recall that particular model offhand, but I've forged literally hundreds of mirrors since I learned the art. They don't all show the world outside, or the desire of one's heart, or one's future. Most are more subtle variations on the standard looking glass—because, after all, that's what people buy it for. But they don't always tell the truth. Some take off ten pounds, some ten years. Some add them. Conversely, some are brutally honest—they reflect a person's true self back at them, and it's not always what that person wants to see."

Caleb eyed her closely, wondering what her reflection would look like in such a mirror. Then something else occurred to him, and he felt like kicking himself for not thinking of it sooner.

"What about mirrors…as a form of transportation?" he ventured.

Lady Dalle quirked one eyebrow at him. "Portal mirrors," she said. "But you're referring to one in particular."

He was more convinced than ever that she could read his mind. "The one that brought me here," he said. "You made it, didn't you?"

"Yes. I called it Daybreaker." She fixed him with the mischievious gaze of a child, and he recoiled inwardly. "That was my greatest achievement in mirrormaking—_the _greatest, if I might be so lofty, because of the magic involved." Her voice was more dreamlike than smug.

Caleb didn't have the patience for self-congratulatory musings at the moment. "Lady Dalle," he said. "Your mirror brought me here, and I need to get back."

She paused, regarding him for a long moment with those glittering eyes. "I'll explain everything," she said, "under the condition that you sit down and have dinner with me. I don't often get to entertain anymore, let alone talk to another human being. You'll humor a lonely old woman for an hour or two, won't you?"

_I don't have much of a choice, do I?_ But he only said, with a moment's hesitation, "Of course."

"Of course," she echoed. "This way, Caleb." She set off with a purpose down the corridor, her unseen heels clicking on the floor, the soft _whish _of her velvet train whisking over cold marble in her wake. Caleb didn't move.

He had never told her his name.


End file.
